Total pages in book: 128
Estimated words: 125140 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 626(@200wpm)___ 501(@250wpm)___ 417(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 125140 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 626(@200wpm)___ 501(@250wpm)___ 417(@300wpm)
I smile broadly into the darkness and silence falls over us once more.
“They think you committed suicide.”
She hesitates for a moment. “I knew they would,” she whispers almost to herself.
“Do you want me to kill him?”
Again, a long pause.
“I will. I can knock her off, too, if you want,” I add with a smirk.
“Don’t tempt me.” She sighs.
“So, you are a nurse?” I ask as I look over at her in the darkness.
“Yes.”
“That’s a cool job.” I shrug to myself. “Must be rewarding saving lives.”
“I save the lives that scum drug dealers like you take.”
A swift kick to the stomach hits me.
“I don’t deal drugs.”
“You ship them. Same thing.”
I think for a moment. “Who were you before you turned eighteen?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she fires back immediately.
“Yes, you do. It came up that you had an identity change at the age of eighteen. What are you hiding?”
She stays silent.
“I am about to help you disappear from the planet. I deserve to know the truth.”
“You deserve Chelsea, that’s all you deserve. Go back to her truth.”
“I want yours.”
“I don’t want yours, so leave me alone.”
For ten minutes we lie in the darkness lost in our own thoughts. Mine are regrets, hers are… I don’t know what.
Eventually, after a long silence, she speaks. “My father was bad.”
I frown.
“He was always a petty criminal but my mom thought she could change him. She fell pregnant with me by accident…” Her voice trails off as if she is far away.
I lie patiently waiting for her to finish. “So she married him?” I ask.
“Yes.”
I frown. I can tell this is hard for her to revisit.
“When I was a little baby, he started getting into organised crime and Mom threatened to leave him.” She pauses. “He beat her so bad, she spent a week in hospital.
The more she tells me, the colder the room becomes.
“When I was two, he got locked up and Mom saw it as a way to escape. We ran to a country town and changed our name.”
Silence falls again.
“When I was five he found us.”
I frown and she stops talking. After a long pause I ask, “What happened?”
“He shot my mother and kidnapped me.”
“She died?” I whisper.
She shakes her head. “No. The police were somehow tipped off where he had me hidden and they got him. He went back to prison.”
“Was your mom okay?”
“She survived but was never good after that. We lived on the edge of fear, changing cities and names every few years. We never had any long-term friends and we were always broke. Not even our family knew where we were.”
I can’t imagine growing up like that. For all of my flaws, my childhood was a dream.
“Then three days before my eighteenth birthday he found us again.”
I sit up and look over at her in the darkness. Her eyes are glazed over and her voice is faint. This is a painful memory for her. She has a distracted air about her as if many tears have been shed.
“He tied me up so I had to watch.” She pauses and I know she is right back there as if it is happening again. “He cut her throat and let her bleed out.”
Fuck.
“I watched as the life drained out of her.”
This time it is me who has no words.
“She was so beautiful,” she whispers. “The one person who I could always trust.”
I don’t know what to say, so I stay silent, and after about ten minutes I reply, “What did he do to you?”
“Nothing, he just took me to get back at her for leaving him. I was taken to a hotel by two of his men.”
I frown. “He has men?”
“He does now. In the beginning it was just him, but now he has help. They took me to a hotel and he was going to pick me up in a few days, but fortunately for me someone got murdered in the room next door so the police came and did random searches of all the rooms. They found me and put me into the witness protection program.”
I frown as I look over at her. God, this is not what I was expecting. “And you became Roshelle Myers?”
“Yes.”
“You have always been alone?”
“Yes,” she replies, monotone. “I used to have this perfect little scenario in my head. It used to get me through the hard days.”
“Like what?”
She smiles. “I was out to dinner with my mom and my dad at an expensive restaurant, my Dad was a well respected doctor. He loved my mom and we lived in a fancy house. We had no worries and life was perfect.”
I smile as I imagine the scenario she is setting.
“This gorgeous guy would come up to us at dinner and ask Dad if he could dance with me and my dad would say no because he was too protective.”