The Girl That Care Forgot ✓

17 • No Mercy

⚠warning: might be triggering. I repeat, there's violence here.

There was a calm atmosphere around the dinner table as they ate away; with Logan and ma chatting causally with the occasional laughs.

Eva let herself relax from the worried state she'd been in ever since her mum told her that they were leaving and that it was to be kept a secret. Seeing that Logan was in fact in a good mood eased her mind a bit and she found herself actually enjoying her meal.

"Do any of you want to go on a holiday perhaps?" Logan asked casually as his conversation with ma came to a halt. "A sort of vacation or something?"

"Of course not darling," ma replied, reaching out across the table and enveloping Logan's hand with her own. "We're happy here, aren't we?" She turned towards Eva, as if urging her to agree.

"Y-yeah," Eva swallowed, her hand toying with the fork now.

Logan let out a low, short laugh, causing Eva to look at him. "That's uh, that's funny, see..." he gave out another low laugh and then laid his spoon down, using his hand to dig into his back pocket. "Because, I, uh, I found —" he finally pulled out two neatly folded rectangular slips, clutching onto them tightly, "— I found two airplane tickets under the name of Caroline Carter and Evelyn Monroe hidden behind the oats can in the pantry cabinet last night." His eyes fall onto the slip and snap back up again. "It's to Texas," he announces amusedly, "we in the mood for some famous Texas barbecue are we?"

Eva's wide eyes fell on her mum and the frozen posture of the older woman set off the panic waves in little Eva's mind.

Was this the secret trip ma was only talking about earlier? The one that Logan wasn't supposed to know about? The one that mum said would let them get away somewhere else?

Was it bad that Logan seemed to know about it now then?

The silence was suffocating, it was as if all the time in the world had stopped, the entire universe waiting for Eva's mother to respond.

Logan's patience however, seemed to be timed and not frozen. He crushed the tickets into balls, his knuckles turning dangerously white as his fist clenched even tighter around what had been Caroline Monroe's escape route — her path to freedom.

He tossed the crumpled pieces of paper to the side and they rolled across the panelled flooring, coming to a stop by the wall below the mantelpiece. "Well what a waste of my money, darling," he sighed but Eva could hear his voice shaking with barely contained anger. "Did you really not think I'd find out if you used my very own credit card? Tip to keep in mind: cash is harder to trace."

He rose, kicking his chair back and it went crashing to the ground. Eva instinctively looked around frantically as if help was going to fall from the sky above. She should know better though — why was she even looking for help? This was mum's fault. She'd angered Logan just like she used to anger pa. And now she was going to have to watch history repeat itself.