Page 1 of The Oath We Give

PROLOGUE

BEFORE FREEDOM

February

“You’re not schizophrenic.”

Ten years.

I’ve waited ten years for someone other than Rosemary Donahue to say those words to me. For someone that was alive and fucking competent to confirm what I’d known for so long.

My gaze is unfazed by this statement. I hold eye contact with Jennifer L. Tako of Evergreen Health Institution. For almost a year, I’ve seen her three days every week. This short, gray-haired woman with a port-wine stain birthmark just beneath her left eye has told me the only thing I’ve ever needed to hear since I was young.

I wait. Wait for several minutes in comfortable silence. Wait for a weight to be lifted, to experience a sense of validation, but that never comes. I can’t bring myself to feel anything other than acceptance.

A lot of my life had been spent living a lie crafted to protect others. Some who didn’t deserve my silence and others who would always be given it freely. And now, I have to sit here with this truth—my truth—and try to make sense of that means for my future.

Would I know how to live a life that wasn’t a lie?

Jennifer adjusts the thin oval-shaped glasses on the bridge of her nose, crossing one dainty leg over the other, a sour expression on her face. I wonder if therapists know they give us the tools to read them too.

“I’m unsure of what kind of doctor thought this diagnosis was okay. It was extremely reckless and warranted a review of his medical license.” Her gaze softens a bit as she looks at me across the coffee table between us. “I’m sorry we can never ask him his reasoning, Silas. You, at the very least, deserve an explanation.”

I bite the inside of my cheek, holding my tongue.

Ponderosa Springs, a town she will never understand, will go to drastic measures to cover up their vile secrets and corruption. There isn’t a Hippocratic oath in the world strong enough to prevent anyone, including a doctor, from lying to avoid backlash.

“Yeah,” I say plainly. “Me too.”

There are no lingering questions for that doctor. I know why he lied to my parents, why he forged medical reports to fit his diagnosis. I’m only sorry that he died in a boating accident before I could make him swallow his own kneecaps for what he’d done to her.

Of course, Jennifer doesn’t know any of this. Doesn’t need to in order to properly evaluate me. No one would ever know why Ronald Brewer made loving parents and a vicious town believe a twelve-year-old boy had schizophrenia.

A secret. An oath I’d vowed to take to my grave. To this day, I’ve kept my word to her. This was the only way I could still protect her.

Although my promise of keeping her safe had been broken the day of her death, I swore to her tombstone that no one would get away with hurting Rosemary Donahue. Never again.

The price on Stephen Sinclair’s head was a pound of flesh, and I’d spit in the face of God to get it.

“I want to say I’m surprised by your reaction,” Jennifer notes, tilting her head a bit. “But since I met you, Silas Hawthorne, you’ve always been a calm surface of water. No one knows the depths below, do they?”

The corner of my lip twitches in response.

“How long have you known you weren’t schizophrenic?”

I relax my back into the leather chair, looking around the glass-and-steel office as I cross my arms across my broad chest and release a heavy breath.

“Since I was fifteen.”

I knew when I was twelve; I knew what I saw, but they had been so good at convincing me it was all my imagination. They were adamant. “There is no girl. There was never a girl,” they told me.

She did not exist. Her voice is in your head. A sick little game my mind played with me.

Over and over again.

It didn’t matter what I said, no one ever believed me.

So I gave in and got quiet. Why speak if no one put weight to the words you said? Maybe they’d conditioned me so well I’d even believed them for a short time.