Letters She Wrote | Outer Banks

𝐱𝐱𝐯. 𝐭𝐚𝐢𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐝 𝐤𝐨𝐨𝐤

[ xxv. tainted kook ]

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WILLA DEVERAUX WAS STILL seething with a fiery, inextinguishable rage by the time she returned home from the Kildare Island's community movie night event.

It was well after midnight, but several of the lights on the lower story of the massively tall house were still on.  Thankfully, her father's large truck was missing from the long driveway, signaling that he was likely still at work, lost in the midst of patient files and endless cups of coffee.  At least, to her relief, Willa knew that her father would not be sitting up in his leather armchair, mindlessly watching the door as the clock ticked later into the humid evening.  The same absence could not be said for her mother though, who was, unsurprisingly, waiting up for the last of her children to trickle on home.

Willa did not bother to enter the mansion quietly, letting the heavy front door slam to a close behind her, booming in rhythm with her erratically pounding heart.  Despite the long walk home, she had not been able to calm herself down in the slightest.  In the back of her mind, she felt as if she were still in that dark park.  She felt as if she were still screaming into a black void of fury, as if she were still clinging to an erratically violent Rafe to slow his cruel punches, as if she were still wielding the stolen handgun that could have turned the night in a completely different and horrific direction.

She could have shot someone.  She could have killed someone.

The thought made Willa nearly sick to her stomach and her throat constricted tightly at the gruesome image her rattled mind had conjured up within the splinters of her pounding brain's muddled chaos.  There would have been so much blood.  So much more than what had already been spilt that night.

Meanwhile, she could feel the dirt and dried grass still caked on her scabbed knees from when she had found herself face down on the ground only an hour prior.  She had not bothered to clean herself up when she left the budding crime scene.  Not when she had been worried about ensuring that both JJ and Pope were alright and stitched up in the aftermaths of their brutal ambushes with the Figure Eight kooks. 

As a result, she could still feel the battered Maybank boy's crusted blood beneath her fingernails.

"Where have you been?"

Maren Deveraux's rigid voice clipped harshly through Willa's distracted trance and the young girl looked up from the cold floors and over to where her mother stood in the kitchen's wide entryway.  Looking over the older woman's shoulder, Willa could see the same familiar mess littering the island's marble tabletop from only days ago: endless Midsummer papers and more than half a bottle of red wine finished. 

In the light above, Willa could see the vibrant flush on her mother's sharpened cheekbones.  Despite Maren's straight posture that could not seemingly suggest anything less than perfected poise, Willa wondered how much her mother had actually had to drink today—and if that had been the reason that Ace had been the one responsible for taking their younger sisters out to the movie.