Knock, knock, knock.
Kate jerked awake at the insistent knocking, eyes adjusting to the early morning sunlight streaming through the bedroom window. It took a second for her to get her bearings, taking in the foreign yet familiar surroundings of her old bedroom before the tapping on the wood started again, this time with more vigour.
"Alright, I'm up!" She grumbled, propping herself up on her elbows and blinking the sleep out of her eyes. Grabbing her phone from the bedside table, Kate took a quick look at the time, noting that she had some unread messages before padding to the bathroom to take a quick shower.
She threw on some jeans and a crew-neck sweater before heading downstairs to find her mom, brother and step-father all seated at the kitchen table apparently waiting on her arrival.
"Ahh, here she is! Merry Christmas Katie!"
Kate struggled not to wince at her step-father's booming voice, instead forcing a smile onto her face as she greeted him with a pat on the shoulder before heading across the kitchen to pull a mug from the cupboard.
"Merry Christmas everybody."
After pouring herself a mug of coffee, Kate dropped down into the chair next to Matt, barely finishing her first mouthful of java when her mother began giving them a rundown of the day.
"...so Aunt Rose is bringing Nanna June but Richard will be here at lunchtime so we really don't have long..."
Christmas in the Meadows' household was always a regimented affair with Grace Meadows-Kimble at the helm running a tight ship. As much as Kate loved her mother, she could never quite understand why she cared so much about what people thought of her. Grace was a woman who had been raised by wealthy parents and, as a result, had become accustomed to a certain way of living.
At the age of twenty-two, Grace met Philip Meadows, a handsome, bookish Physics major who was attending Yale on a scholarship and the two embarked on a brief, passionate affair, culminating in a pregnancy that took them both by surprise.
The subsequent marriage was borne out of Grace's parents' somewhat archaic view that that the baby shouldn't be born out of wedlock and, against their better judgement, the two married in a lavish ceremony a mere four months before Matthew's arrival.
Kate came along three years later but the marriage of convenience was never destined to stand the test of time and after ten years the couple divorced, tired of constantly trying and failing to make one another happy.
Ultimately, they were just too different.
Whilst Grace believed that having the 'correct' social standing was the key to a happy and successful life, her husband was the polar opposite. An amenable and soft-spoken man, Philip came from a working middle-class family and his only goal in life was to watch his two children grow and flourish into happy, well-adjusted adults.
Kate adored her father and had been a 'daddy's girl' from the off, the two of them completely inseparable right up until the day he died. Kate was a sophomore at Harvard when her father was killed and she can still recall the last thing he ever said to her.
'None of us are getting out of this alive, Katie-Bug. Might as well spend it doing what you love!'
And so she did. Every single day she reminded herself that it could all be yanked out from underneath you at any given moment and so she followed her gut and, more importantly, she followed her heart.
"...Kate, are you even listening to me?"
Darting her eyes to her mother's unamused face, Kate drained the last dregs of her almost cold coffee and flashed her mother with what she hoped were innocent eyes.
YOU ARE READING
Perfect Storm
Fanfiction[Book 1 of the Kate Meadows/ Hank Voight series] Chicago hadn't been an obvious choice but Kate knew getting away from New York was the right decision. What she hadn't counted on was the ghosts of her past following not too far behind her...oh, and...
