Collateral Damage by Gwenan Haines

Author:Gwenan Haines [Haines, Gwenan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Suspense,
Publisher: The Wild Rose Press
Published: 2015-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 12

Laura sat with her head against the bathroom wall, breathing hard. The linoleum floor tiles were cool beneath her and one of the mirror lights had burnt out, making the room comfortably dim. Dalton knelt beside her, wiping her face with a wet hand towel. The contents of her stomach were long gone, flushed down the toilet. She felt as if she would never be able to get up off that floor. She wasn’t sure she wanted to.

“He’s a monster,” she said. “I work for a monster. All this time I thought he was just an ordinary womanizer. I never realized he was a—” She broke off, covering her eyes with the back of her arm.

“You should consider yourself lucky he never noticed you,” Dalton said. “All those other girls, the ones he promoted—God only knows what he did with them. To them.”

Laura turned her head away from him. “I wasn’t always lucky.”

Dalton leaned forward to push her damp hair away from her face. “I didn’t think so,” he said, kissing her cheek lightly. “It’s all right. Whatever happened, it wasn’t your fault.”

She nodded. “I never believed that,” she said, her eyes closed. “I always thought I asked for it. That it was something I did. The way I dressed.”

“You don’t have to talk about it.”

“No, I want to. I was thinking about what you said—about keeping victims anonymous. I wish now I’d told somebody, done something. If I had, he wouldn’t have been able to do what he did to me to somebody else.”

She propped herself up against the wall and pushed the hand towel away. Dalton rolled back onto his heels and waited for her to speak. Laura cleared her throat a couple of times. After so many years of keeping the events of that night locked up inside her, it was hard to finally let them out.

“It was the summer between my freshman and sophomore year of high school. My best friend moved to Florida at the end of the school year, and I was feeling kind of lost. I’d only been at my school a couple of years, and I didn’t really know the other kids that well. Fairfield was a small town back then—it still is—and it seemed as everybody’d known everybody else since kindergarten. Even if you’d lived there five or six years, you were still basically the new girl. And being the new girl sucked.”

Laura paused as memories of that summer rose within her. She remembered how alone she’d been after Sarah left, how desperate for someone to talk to. Her parents hadn’t met until they were in their late thirties, so she didn’t have any brothers or sisters. Being an only child had never bothered her until her mother died and that summer the loneliness was almost unbearable. Her father wasn’t unkind, but she always felt like a disappointment to him, as if she wasn’t enough. One time her uncle let it slip that he’d wanted a boy, so she’d always assumed maybe that was the reason he’d seemed so distant.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.