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CHAPTER TEN identity theft
⋆*✧･ﾟ:⋆*･ﾟ:*✧･ﾟ:*✧･ﾟ:
ON NOVEMBER 5TH, 1991, just over two years since his wife had died, Beau Vidal—traumatized, scarred, and only recently able to go out into the world again—met Yvonne Descoteaux.
He'd spent the last two years in and out of therapy, occasionally finding the hard-backed chairs of the waiting room and soft leather couches of the actual office more familiar than his own home. The gruesome nature of Louise's death hadn't exactly gone down easy, dipping him down into a sick combination of depression, anxiety, and PTSD. Every night, he dreamed about warm blood running down his face. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw Louise slump forward, her already crimson lips stained an even darker red. Every time he let himself be happy, her final choked gasps rang in his ears.
So therapy had been a necessity. Beau went twice a week, always at four o'clock, letting his assistant take over the running of La Petite Montagne while he spewed out every detail about the past few days to a forty-something woman with spectacles and a wispy gray bun. Dr. Monet prescribed him pills, talked him through his panic attacks, and encouraged him to face the fears that had formed from that fateful day. Beau followed all of her advice dutifully, wanting nothing more than to stop seeing his wife's dead face and feel her cold skin under his hand. Even so, his recovery was not a linear process.
There were times when he couldn't stand Dr. Monet and her soft, soft voice, the crinkles at the edges of her gray eyes. There were times when the prospect of taking another pill nearly drove him insane, and he reached for a bottle instead. There were days he spent completely in bed, bags lining his eyes, wishing for nothing more than to join his wife.
He never got a clear answer on the unexpected ailment that had killed Louise. The coroner told him it was an unexpected brain aneurysm—and, indeed, the signs were all there. But Beau had never quite believed that. There had been something about the look on his wife's face, the way her death had happened that screamed that it had been more than just a bulge in a blood vessel. This had been something right out of a movie. This had been something that didn't feel wholly real.
A few months after Louise's death, Beau got an email all the way from Dublin, Ireland. In it, a man claiming to be the younger brother of a local butcher who had unexpectedly passed away stated that her strange death—also labelled as a brain aneurysm—had occurred on the exact same day as Louise's. And, if you didn't account for time zones, the same time, too.
Despite his own suspicions, though, Beau had written that off as the ramblings of a conspiracy theorist sticking his nose where it didn't belong. His wife had no connection to some butcher—nor a teacher in Cape Town, South Africa, or an Amish farmer in Pennsylvania, USA. Whatever her death was, it hadn't been a part of some worldwide scheme.
