This time he heard her tears, but he didn’t know if she heard him. “Tell me where you are so I can come rescue you.”
“No,” she whispered. “I deserve this.”
That truth slammed into his heart.
“Because of your daughter?”
“Yes, because of my daughter.”
“But other people can’t blame you for something that was an accident.”
“I should have taken more care,” she whispered. “I should have been looking after her.”
“That would be nice, but that isn’t the way life works.” At that, she started crying, and he didn’t know what to do. How do you even begin to deal with that level of guilt and pain? “We can get you out of there, and you can talk to somebody, get some help.”
“I don’t deserve any help,” she said.
“Are you at your home with your husband?”
“No,” she whispered. “He didn’t want me there anymore.”
“Why?”
“He said it was too hard to see me and to not see Jillie.”
Simon winced. “That’s hardly fair.”
“Nothing is fair, not now.”
It occurred to him that maybe she was being kept for a reason that wasn’t necessarily bad. “Have you been suicidal?” There was silence at the other end, and then she cried some more. His heart sank. “You’ve tried to kill yourself, haven’t you?”
“Yes,” she whispered. “I don’t want to live in this darkness. I don’t want to live in this pain.”
He sank down into his chair. “Are you at your parents’ house?”
“It doesn’t matter. This is my life now.”
“You can’t be sitting there, sick with grief every day for the rest of your life. This won’t go away. All the better that you learn to find the tools to deal with what’s happened.”
“Who are you to say that?” she snapped.
“Somebody who doesn’t want to see you waste your whole life because of one mistake. Surely you can envision doing something that would make you feel like you deserve to live again.”
“There’s no way to bring her back,” she said sadly.
“What if you worked to help people? What if you worked to do something to help others?”
“I tried to change the traffic intersection, but that failed.”
He stared ahead blankly. “Were you involved in that too?”
“Yes, not in a big way, just in a little way.”
“Ah. Then I guess you’re blaming the traffic for the driver.”
“At the time I was ready to blame anybody, anything that would take some of the blame off me. But there is no getting away from my involvement.”
“Who told you that?”