Lauren Sanders is struggling to rebuild her life with her aunt and cousin after her family's tragic death. But what no one knows is the truth about two things: how her parents really died and her battle with schizophrenia.
One day, Lauren stumbles...
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She's been silent since earlier and I can't blame her.
I watch as she stares at the table with her head lowered down, blinking her eyes every minute or two as I still contemplate speaking up. I kept opening my mouth and closing it right away every three minutes as I fidget with my fingers under the table.
We've been sitting here at Ruby's diner for almost an hour. It seemed as if there were no room for conversations between us so I simply obliged by her silence. When she tilted her head up and looked me in the eyes, it felt like I saw a glimmer of hope of having to revive something that nearly died between us.
I opened my mouth and closed it again when she pushed a folded note in front of me on the table. I look at the note and then looked at her.
The expression on her face didn't change after she cried earlier when we were inside the car. It seemed like she wasn't herself because I could no longer feel her energy. Then again, I can't blame her.
Her eyes demanded me to speak and so I did confabulate, even though I lacked the words to speak up for it to be clean.
"It wasn't right for me to keep it from you but it wasn't right to hand it over to you when it's obviously addressed to someone else either," I continue to stare at the folded note, visualizing the highlighted parts in my head.
When I gathered the strength to look back at her as her burning gaze continuously pierced me through, I almost got scared that she saw and caught me in between words I'd stumbled upon.
"I'm sure that your sister would want that specific person to find this note—" I raised the note in the air and watch her eyes glare at it, "—and have them keep it as it was written for them."
"And that's your reason for keeping it from me?" She spoke as she slowly averts her gaze back at me.
She lets out a long sigh before she continued, "I respect, understand, and agree with what you said and I don't care whether that note and its contents are addressed for someone else to be read, but for you to keep the note from me without even telling me anything about it is what I don't agree with."
She crossed her arms to her chest, "And what were you planning on it? Find the person and hand it over to them—"
"That's exactly the plan."
She stopped speaking and immediately closed her mouth. I watch as she looks away from me.
Sometimes, I wanted to dive inside her thoughts the way she does every time, instead of leaving me here clueless as I continuously read her on the outside, forced to silently obey like a service dog.
"Have you read it?"
I give her a silent nod as I glance at her. Her eyes soften as she gently turns her head to look at me. I had the impression that the picket fences separating us were progressively falling away.
"Do you believe that they love each other?"
"I believe that they loved each other," I swallowed the lump that formed in my throat, "But I also believe that one of them loved the other in a manner that the other didn't because it was all they could ever give."
She nodded her head and stare at the note on the table.
"Should we find him, then?"
When she glanced at me, it briefly appeared as though she was searching for something in my eyes, which caused me to draw myself in an attempt to make myself smaller.
"Maybe?"
As she cocked an eyebrow at me, I continued.
"If that's something you're ready to know."
Her gaze challenged me as much as my words did, and I felt as though I had been drowning in a self-built doom for the longest period of my life even before I could dive further into it.
***
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