“Tell me what you remember,” Phoenix says to me.
I shake my head. “You’ll hate me.”
“What’s the alternative?” he asks. “You can’t hide the truth. Not for long. Not from yourself.”
He’s right about that. It’s the one absolute that I feel like I’ve been blind to this entire time.
I raise my eyes and try to blink away my tears. I don’t want to make myself the victim in this. Because I’m not. I may have once believed what I was doing was right, good—even noble.
But that was my crime.
I was ignorant. Willfully ignorant. I refused to think for myself. Instead, I believed what they fed me and I bought into the meat grinder they’d set up in the guise of a sanctuary from the world.
“Elyssa,” Phoenix presses, “it’s time to talk.”
I take a deep breath, just like he’d suggested. It doesn’t hel
