Mallory's Melody

Chapter 58

AVA HARRISON RIPPED THE PAGE out of her notepad and threw it into the bin that was already overflowing with crumpled paper balls. It should be about a hundred drafts she'd discarded by now, and each one seemed significantly worse than the last. With every new leaf came a more intense dissatisfaction, more conviction that seventeen years of solitude had robbed her of her writing skills. But as she looked at the picture of Mallory sitting on her desk, she realised that her dissatisfaction didn't come from her inability to write. It came from not having them here, from not having Mallory and her son by her side at this moment.

Shaking it from her mind, Ava got up to examine Mallory Trent's room. She was still indebted to Susan Wells for allowing her to stay in their home, and Ava had specifically requested to be in Mallory's room in the hopes that it would inspire her to write. She couldn't have been any more wrong.

Mallory's room was blindingly pink, everything from the colour of the walls to the furniture screaming of a very harsh feminity. Her wardrobes were full of the kind of clothes that barbie would probably wear with how brightly colourful they were. The sort of books she read were of the fairytale kind. There were books, and there were books. They were books that imitated reality, and there were other ones that got their inspiration from snow-white and Cinderella. This room bespoke of someone who had been caged up from reality, of an almost pitiable naivete.

"You promised not to snoop." Susan's voice caught Ava aback. She was leaning against the doorway with her arms folded.

Ava sighed. "I'm sorry, I—"

"You noticed it too, didn't you?" Susan asked, picking up a book that Ava had accidentally knocked off the display. She placed it in its former position with deliberate accuracy, with the precision of someone who had been in here a million and one times, to the extent that they knew the position of the littlest and most insignificant of things. Ava wasn't the only snooper.

"Noticed what?"

Susan smiled at the picture of Mallory sitting on the desk. She drew her finger along the wooden frames with feline admiration, and Ava saw instantly that Susan, whoever she was to Mallory, loved her fiercely. "Cole was determined to cage her," Susan began. "I saw how protective he was of her. Everything he did was just to make sure she didn't turn out like Jane. He wanted to chip every single possibility of Janeery off her."

"That's not possible," Ava said. "Cole didn't even know who Jane was at that point."

Susan looked Ava square in the eye. "You'll be shocked by how much love can dull your perceptions. Cole knew who Jane was. There were shreds of pieces of evidence everywhere at the time they were dating. He knew about how promiscuous she could be. He knew she was a heartbreaker, but yet he denied it. And then he deflected all the things he hated about Jane onto Mallory. He didn't want Mallory to turn out like her."

There was pure hurt on Susan's face. "What he didn't understand was that Mallory was different. You could argue about nature and nurture but there was no way in hades Mallory could've been like Jane."

Confusion eluded Ava, as to why Susan was telling her all this in the first place. She listened still, moved by the raw pain on Susan's face. The tears that were streaming down her face. "God, I should've told him to stop protecting her. I should've said it point-blank, 'hey Cole, I love you but you need to stop. You're not helping her. You're making her naive and victimizing her.' But I didn't tell him. Instead, I watched from a corner and despised Mallory. I hated the attention he gave her. I'd been around the time he was dating Jane, and it was the same attention he'd given her too. We dated all through highschool and college, but the moment Jane came into his life—"

"He ghosted you," Ava said, understanding. "And then you projected your hatred for Jane onto Mallory. You thought Mallory was like her."

Susan plopped on the chair. "I hoped she was. I really did. But she wasn't. Oh, Ava, I did a lot of terrible things to Mallory. On many instances, I tried to turn her father against her. I tried to poison her, I tried to—I just wanted the worst possible thing to happen to her, and now that it has...now that she's in the hospital fighting for her life, I can't help but think it was my fault. It was all my—"