Page 18 of Don't Leave Me
This is what it’s like for her. When her lungs get tight and she struggles to breathe. Easy in, and out.
Taking time to catch my breath, to regain some equilibrium, I finally joined her on the park bench. Where yesterday, I’d sat and watched her lock the store thinking she looked a lot like Ash. So much so, that I’d had to come back here just to prove to myself it couldn’t be true.
Except it was. All of it. True.
I didn’t look at her, just stared straight ahead at her store. I could feel her fidgeting next to me. Her hands twisting in her lap, her sneakered foot bouncing on the ground.
“I don’t know how to start,” she said finally. “I didn’t think you would ever come. You were so adamant that day about not finding her, and it’s been so long since you’ve been out…”
That I would ever come? How was it possible to come for her if I believed she was dead? Except I had come for her.
Wait, no. I’d coming looking for my mother.
“You took my mother’s name,” I said dully, still trying to push through the shock of seeing her.
“I’m sorry, Marc. This, along with everything else, is going to hurt you. Your mother died. About seven years ago, of an overdose.”
There was no room in my skull for more pain or grief. My mother, for all intents and purposes, had been dead to me since she’d left me that last time. Left me for Florida. Surely, there was irony in there somewhere. I just couldn’t figure that out at the moment.
“You took her name,” I repeated dully, trying to form some pattern in her actions that made sense.
Leaving Evan made sense. Dying. Not telling me. That was a form of cruelty I didn’t think she was capable of.
“I thought maybe you would look for her. I told you that you needed to. For closure. But then you said it would never happen, and I believed you. I believed I would never see you again. You have to know how much that hurt me, but I had no choice.”
I let her words sift through my brain, trying to put the pieces together. I still couldn’t look at her. I couldn’t look at her face without hating her, and that was its own kind of pain. I’d wanted to see her, just one more time, for so long, so desperately.
“How long?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know what you’re asking.”
“How long had you planned all of this?” I asked, pointing in the direction of the bakery.
She sighed. “It’s a long story.”
“Got nowhere to be just now.”
“The night you got arrested back when I was in high school—”
“Prom night,” I said thickly.
“Prom night,” she repeated. “That night, my father was so enraged to see what I was wearing, knowing you were taking me, he hit me. He’d never done it before, and I think it shocked us both. He sent me to Arizona, and I thought, what if I don’t do what he told me? What if I went somewhere else, instead? So I went to San Diego. He had someone track me down. So easily. That’s what planted the seed. I knew if there ever came a time I had to run away, I had to be smarter. I started to plan. But you have to know that plan always included you, Marc.”
She touched my arm, and I flinched as if it physically hurt to be touched.
“Only I ran out of time,” she said softly.
“Why?”
“I’ll tell you that. I will. But I have to know first what your plans are.”
My plans? I shot up off the bench and started to pace. My plan was to take down Evan Sanderson for the murder of Ashleigh Landen. My plan was to destroy him and his whole damn world. This was my only mission in life, but now I knew he was innocent of all of it.
No, not quite all of it.
“Why couldn’t you just fucking divorce him?” I snapped.
She shook her head slowly. “I knew too much. If I threatened to leave him, if I told him I wanted out, he would have killed me. He was capable of it. I had to kill myself before I could let him do that. It was the only way.”
