Page 1 of Follow Me
Chapter One
October
What’s wrong with me? It’s been over a year.
Mallory Hansen stared at herself in the mirror as she prepared for the Halloween party.
Although she really didn’t have much to get readyfor. Her wardrobe was extremely limited now, and she didn’t have a costume she could wear that would fit her, even if she felt like wearing one. Tonight she’d don one of the black maxi-dresses that was actually way too big for her now, and a black cardigan over that to hide her arms and torso.
I have a whole closet full of cute clothes I can’t wear because they’re too fucking big for me.
It was enough to make her want to cry.
The irony wasn’t lost on her that at one point in her not-too-distant past she would’ve killed to be smaller.
This wasn’t what she had in mind, and she was far enough along in her recovery to know she wasn’t in a healthy place.
Sticking to a long-term recovery plan had proved difficult for her, though.
She’d had to beg and plead with her husband, Askel, to check her out of the treatment facility in Tampa and bring her home to Sarasota for tonight’s Halloween party at Seth and Leah’s. She’d missed so many events already—she missed theirfriends. And Kel wouldn’t attend any lifestyle events if she wasn’t with him, despite her telling him she wanted him to go. That heaped more guilt onto her even though Kel assured her he was fine not attending events without her.
She already felt tense this evening because Kel wasnothappy with her right now. At all. But she was going stir-crazy at the facility. It was a nice place, except she couldn’t leave when she wanted to, had no freedom, and she was getting tired of sitting in group sessions and not having any new answers, or sitting in one-on-ones with her lead therapist, Dr. Susan Abrahms, and feeling like she was getting absolutely nowhere with her recovery now.
Yes, with her daily journal she could look back and see how she felt more clear-headed again with the new medicine regimen, but…
Yeah.
She’d been a breath away this morning from demanding a divorce from Kel over his initial reluctance to help her check out, even just for the night.
Those thoughts had pulled her up short, though, once she realized she’d had them.
She loved him.
But she was ready for something…differentnow. Not meaning him. Meaning this whole situation with her anorexia.
Something in her lifehadto change.
She refused to spend the rest of her life locked up in an inpatient treatment center for eating disorders. For starters, they couldn’t afford it. The fact that friends who could afford it stepped in to pay for it—friends who’dliterallyhit the lottery—was beside the point.
It made things worse for her, actually. Made her feel even more guilty she hadn’t managed to get her shit together long before now.
I can’t keep doing things this way.
At five-six, at her heaviest before her pregnancy, she’d been almost one-seventy, and then during her pregnancy had made it up to nearly two hundred pounds just before…
But her usual weight had averaged anywhere from one-fifty to one-sixty while with Kel. Right now, she’d actually regained and maintained a few pounds and was a whopping one-ten, and she’d made it through the worst of the initial effects of trying to restart her body’s metabolism. Her medical team’s current goal for her was to get her to one-twenty-five and see how she did, with an acceptable weight range of anywhere from one-seventeen to one-fifty. She’d lost a lot of muscle mass, too, something she was trying to rebuild by doing yoga alone in her room every day, as well as carefully supervised gentle low-impact weight training at the facility’s gym.
Kel walked into the bedroom. She’d tried to get him to take a shower with her earlier, but he’d gently refused with a mumbled excuse that didn’t make any sense no matter how she tried to spin it, unless she looked at it in the most obvious way.
He didn’t want to see her naked.
Rationally, she understood that was due to how underweight she was—yes, logically she understood she was underweight—but it pissed her off as a spouse.
It’d been over six months since they’d last attempted to make love, and even then it’d been like he was afraid to touch her. Neither of them had ended up getting off, and Mal had ended up crying herself to sleep in Kel’s arms.
They hadn’t actually played in…
Well, since before she’d lost the baby the previous March. Here they were now, eighteen months later.
