Her usual lecturing tone snapped back at me, flustered by my coldness.
"Jared, I know you're angry, but can't you be rational? He was drunk and having an episode—he couldn't control himself! You're a normal person; how could you stoop to his level and hit him so hard?"
Here we go again.
I looked at her—the woman I'd loved for seven years, the woman who had almost become my wife—and suddenly she felt utterly foreign.
"Eliana," I said slowly, "just because he can't control himself, it's okay for him to smash a bottle over my head?"
Her eyes flickered. "He didn't mean it—"
"Then his insult to my mother was unintentional too?" I fixed my gaze on hers so she couldn't look away. "Was all that just ‘unconscious babbling'?"
"He was talking nonsense!" Eliana raised her voice. "Why are you picking on a patient?"
"Why can't I?" My tone cooled. "Just because he's ill, does that give him the right to trample my dignity, my feelings, and my mother's memory? Why must I always be the one to suffer and understand?"
"Eliana, the things you did back then, the guilt you carry—why should I pay the price for them?" I pushed.
Her face went blank. After all, she had never heard me speak so bluntly.