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Six Years Later — set one year before the epilogue.
You don't know pain until you've been abducted. You don't know pain until you've had three of your ribs broken, one of your legs, and your arms dislocated from their sockets. You don't know pain until you've been beaten so bad, you don't remember what it was like before you felt this type of pain.
You don't know pain until you've been ripped away from your wife and your newborn daughter. And you definitely don't know pain until you've thought about the fact that you might never see them again. It hurts more than physical pain, to know that your daughter will grow up and you won't be there to see it. To know that you won't get to grow old with the person you swore to always stand by. It hurts like a bitch. More than the feel of ribs being broken, arms being dislocated, and being punched to the point where your right eye has swollen shut.
I stare ahead at the cement wall in front of me that has streaks of dry blood on it. It may be mine. It may belong to Wes or some other person they tortured in here. I stopped paying attention after day three. It was now day one hundred and sixty-two and I'm falling apart. Not just because my arm lays limp at my side or because if I breathe wrong, searing pain shoots through me but because I'm falling apart on the inside. With every moment that passes, every moment I could be spending with my wife and daughter, my heart shreds more and more. I used to sleep just to escape my mind. When I slept, my mind became blank and when it did, I couldn't recall any memories. And when I didn't, it saved some hope that I would get out of here before my heart was completely torn into two pieces.
That was on day forty-two. Now, on day one hundred and sixty-two, I don't sleep. I don't let my mind blank. I let my heart rip itself to shreds, I let the pain wash over me because sometimes all we can do is welcome the pain and hope it goes away.
I turn my head to the left, ignoring the throbbing in my brain to look at Wes. He didn't look better than me and he rarely spoke these days. He has blood all over his face, trailing from his temple down his shirt. He stares blankly at the torture table across the room, the only reason I know he's still alive is because his thumb absentmindedly twists his wedding band on his ring finger. He began doing that on day fifty-three and never stopped. He stopped talking entirely on day eighty-six.
He used to cry a little whenever they left after torturing us. He cried because he missed his wife....and their unborn daughter. But she's five months old now. Out of the family, Wes was the most obsessed behind Odessa's now husband, Rowan, so being away from her for so long is affecting him.
No one knows how much he cried that day. The day they informed him he missed his daughter's birth. He missed Candice almost dying in childbirth. Except me. I saw him crumble the second that steel door closed. I saw him sob into his bloody hands, then bang his head onto the wall to the point where he knocked himself out. I saw him reel with the fact that he missed it, then completely shut down to someone who's unrecognizable. Someone who will never be the same again, regardless of the fact if we ever get out of here.
