Page 47 of Life After

“Jen.”

“Just…imagine it. Please.” Jen needed Suzanne to understand. It would make all of this far easier. “No family. No friends. Very limited job opportunities.” Jen swallowed down the emotion in her throat and continued. “Then you meet someone, and she gives you a reason to fall back in love with life. Her smile is the first thing you think about when you wake up, and her laugh reminds you that no matter what, everything is okay. But then she drops your bag of belongings in front of you, tells you she never would have dated you if she’d known from the outset, and asks you to leave.”

“I know the things I said to you were terrible, but I never meant them.” Suzanne visibly swallowed. “You may find that hard to believe, but I didn’t.”

“I think you did,” Jen said, nodding slowly. “I think you felt hurt by what Tracy had told you, and you wanted to hurt me in return. Which you did, by the way.”

“You surely understand the shock I was in.” Suzanne frowned as she sighed. “I’d just been told that my girlfriend had recently been released from prison. I’m bound to have some kind of reaction to it.”

“Oh, I agree. I absolutely agree.”

“Then—”

“Then you told me you never would have asked me on a second date if you’d known from the start.” It crushed Jen when she reminded herself of that. They’d spent so much time together, made a lot of memories in those months, and Suzanne hadstillsaid that. From that point on, everything Jen had allowed herself to dream about was dead and buried…along with her heart. “Did she paint me in some terrible light?”

“No, she didn’t.” Suzanne ran a hand through her dark hair and sat back against the couch. She stared at the fireplace, her hands clasped in her lap. “She told me you stopped her from getting hurt one day, though.”

“I heard what was happening, and I spoke up.” Jen scoffed. “Then I got a beating for it.”

“You what?” Suzanne’s head snapped around in Jen’s direction.

Jen smiled weakly. “They never knew. The guards. The other inmates preferred to inflict pain where they wouldn’t see it. I had broken ribs for sure. The bruising was pretty impressive.”

“Why didn’t you go to Tracy?”

“Because Suzanne…prison doesn’t work like that. If I’d gone to someone about it, it would have happened again and again. While not everyone was terrible inside, I was housed with women who had no issue beating someone to within an inch of their life. I wasn’t willing to risk that. Though, sometimes, I wonder if it would have been easier.”

“What would have been easier?”

Jen sat back and mirrored Suzanne’s position. “To not be here.”

“Jen, I don’t ever want to hear you say that again.” Suzanne took Jen’s hand, holding it tighter when Jen tried to pull away again. “But I do want to hear about how it happened. I want to better understand the headspace you were in and what led to prison.”

Jen didn’t often talk about the reasons why she hit rock bottom. It had taken almost six months before she opened up to the prison counsellor. But she would open up for Suzanne. She deserved answers, if nothing else. “When Ruby died, I had all these plans I wanted to put in place. I wanted to find out why it happened to her and why it happens to other people. People so young dying so suddenly… Therehadto be a reason why.” Jen sighed. “I guess that’s why they call it Sudden Adult Death Syndrome, though.”

Suzanne nodded. “It has to be incredibly difficult to understand something like that.”

“But within a few months of her death, I started to get angry. At Ruby, at the world, at anyone who looked at me. I found the best way to cope was with mild drugs and alcohol. Sometimes one or the other, other times both.” Jen couldn’t imagine putting another drug in her body ever again. Before Ruby’s death, she rarely drank. To go from one extreme to the other, Jen still struggled to understand the how or why. “I couldn’t function at my job, so I took time off. They understood, and they were great with me about when I’d return. Offered me support and everything else.”

“But you didn’t take it.”

“Nope. I just wanted to be alone, drinking until I saw the bottom of the bottle and medicating in any way I could to get me through the miserable days and nights.”

“That’s understandable. You’d just lost your best friend.”

“The prison sentence was a culmination of everything, really. Shoplifting. Drug and alcohol-related behaviours. Criminal damage when I put my fist through a bar window.” Jen looked down at the faint scars on her right hand and shook her head. “Stupid things that only turned into one huge thing eventually.”

“How do you mean?” Suzanne asked, genuinely listening to every last word Jen spoke.

“Mental health services are terrible around here. They have a small team to help with a huge problem. It’s just not enough.” Jen wanted to believe that things had changed over the last year or so, but the mental health crisis in this country was only growing bigger. At an alarming rate, too. “I guess you’d know what I mean since you mentioned therapy when John died.”

Suzanne smiled weakly. “I paid for a private therapist.”

Of course Suzanne had. It explained why she’d come out of this with her head still in one piece. “Yeah. That makes sense.”

“But I am aware of the mental health crisis in this country. I’m sorry you fell into the void when it came to finding help.”

“It all ended when I took my mum’s car. I wasn’t drunk or under the influence of drugs, but I wasn’t insured. Add in the other court appearances I’d had for drunk and disorderly, the shoplifting too, and they decided to make an example out of me.”

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