Camden by Gadziala Jessica

Author:Gadziala, Jessica
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-09-20T16:00:00+00:00

20/20.

He was right.

Hindsight was always twenty-twenty.

Still, I felt like most women would have seen red flags. Me, I just wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt. I'd felt bad about rejecting him. Maybe if I hadn't been so sorry for something that hadn't been in my control - the way my body responded - I might have seen those giant red flags back then too.

The flowers that started to come at the door or at my work, those just made me sad. They made my mother hopeful.

After a few weeks of them coming every single day, I couldn't stand the sight of fresh cut flowers anywhere anymore. They went straight into the garbage, much to my mother's objections.

"It's not the flowers' fault that you don't like who sent them. Why can't we just enjoy their beauty?"

I didn't see anything beautiful when I looked at them. I saw unwanted attention. I saw a man who didn't want to take no for an answer. Even a full month later.

"But then the unthinkable happened," I went on, watching as Cam's face went sad. He knew what was coming.

The unthinkable could only be one thing.

My mom died.

And I had been so blithely unaware.

She'd gotten off her shift before I had, so it didn't surprise me that she had passed out before I got in. She was older than me, and I could barely make it to my bed most nights.

According to the official reports, though, she'd been dead when I had gotten home.

Then I went about my morning like nothing was wrong, figuring she was already gone. It wasn't until I was about to walk out the door that I saw her purse still on the table there.

There was no reason to panic. It was entirely possible that she wasn't feeling great. She sometimes got crippling migraines that would make her ask for her shift to be pushed back. Or someone could have called and begged to take her shift because they had a pressing bill that needed to be paid.

"But I knew."

My stomach plummeted as I flew through the living room, knocking over a chair in the process, screaming for her.

"She was cold," I admitted, feeling all that food in my stomach wobble around ominously at the memory.

Everything after that was a blur.

I hadn't called the police. But someone did. The female officer who showed up had pulled my sobbing body off of my mother, checking for a pulse even though it was clear as day that she had been long passed.

The coroner came.

I was given instructions that I don't even remember actually hearing. The officer was good enough to write it all down for me for when the shock wore off.

"Then it was all the arrangements," I went on. "I forgot all about Thomas."

Until he showed up at my door.

"I shouldn't have let him in."

To that, Cam's left hand grabbed my wrist, giving it a squeeze as he wrote with his right.

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