CHAPTER FIVE . Malignant Faults ( please read the content warnings for this book before continuing - they're located at the end of first chapter / introduction! )
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People who have their lives together wake up early and shower every morning. They have three meals a day and go to work without wanting to scream. They go to bed at a reasonable hour and wake up feeling excited for the next day. Francesca does not have her life together. She wakes up but only because she has to and goes to sleep only when her eyes hurt and are begging for her to shut them.
She likes the night. She finds the dark comforting, the possibility that the sun might not rise. The suspension of time, where the darkness seems like it'll last forever and you won't have to face tomorrow.
She's never tired anyway - well . . . she's always tired she just can't sleep (which is probably why she's always tired). Forcing herself to stay awake until she physically can't anymore because she doesn't want the next day to arrive. The day where she has to repeat the dreaded events of the previous twenty-four hours.
It wasn't even that her job was that awful. She had been working since she was fifteen and had worked at much worse places. Her parents were lower-class and whilst they made enough to comfortably pay for the things they needed - and even things they wanted - she felt guilty taking money from them. So she wasn't forced to get a job, they'd happily give her money if she asked, but it made her feel at peace getting one.
Childhood wasn't something Francesca had. Her parents were amazing, it wasn't their fault.
She began working young, she took school too seriously and did chores around the house to help out her mum without being asked. These were all things she inflicted upon herself, she made herself grow up too fast. She didn't realise it at the time, she liked feeling like a grown-up but then you get older and things get harder. You have to work, you have to do chores. She had spent so long doing them that she had burnt herself out years ago.
She cared when it didn't matter and now that it did all she wanted was a break. A year of her life where it would all just stop.
Diane Aldridge, her mum, was a little too much of a people pleaser. It makes her feel awful - guilty that she isn't like that too. Everyone back in her home town knows her mother - friends of hers always told Francesca how 'selfless' and 'caring' she is. It only reminded her that she isn't anything like that - how she doesn't feel like her mother's child. It's a trait she hates, and despises, how she was not a 'people person' but it wasn't something that she could change so she pretends to like it.
