Time Stands Still

Chapter 16

I inhaled sharply, but I remained silent. I didn't trust myself to not say anything incriminating at that moment.

Luckily my mother continued on her tale about me. "I don't even know how she did it but she got involved somehow and went to the police with her tale about the illegal maple syrup trade that I was talking about earlier. She got two dealers arrested. That's when MapleTechs got involved with me."

I briefly closed my eyes. I considered asking her to stop, but somewhere far in the depths of mind I also knew that I needed to know what she was going to tell me. Even though I suspected that I could never forgive my mother for what she was about to say.

"They told me to make her drop the charges, but I already knew that she wasn't going to do that. She was too much like her father in that respect."

I blinked in surprise. I had never known that she compared me to her father. She always told me how disappointed he would have been in me. Not ever was it mentioned that I shared some traits with him.

"So I tried to convince them to leave her alone," she told me.

I couldn't help but drop my mouth. The mother, who had called me every single name under the sun and wasn't afraid to slap me, tried to convince somebody not to harm me. I wanted to call bullshit.

"But they didn't listen," her voice sounded wistful. "And they continued on. So I eventually gave up. It seemed like I couldn't do much more for her. After all, she had gotten herself in that mess in the first place."

"You knew that they were going to kill her," my voice quivered.

My mother smirked. "Well, I thought that they would, but in the end she did it herself. She killed herself all by herself."

"How could you?" I couldn't help but ask.

Once again, the smirk got better. "You killed your father. You deserved to die."

My body froze as I watched my mother stand up from her chair before she lunged forward over the table to grab me. I fell backwards in my chair with a loud thud. My mother reached to grab my throat, but I didn't do anything. My thoughts were still busy processing what my mother had said. There was no room in my head to think about defending myself.

Luckily the guards came rushing into the room. They pulled my mother off me rather swiftly with no harm done to me. I watched them handcuff her and pull her struggling body out of the room, but nothing really seemed to register in me.

One of them came up to me and apologized. They told me something about recent mental problems and that it rarely happened and I must have gotten unlucky.

But I knew the truth. My mother wanted revenge.

I should have known that she never cared. I should have never gotten my hopes up when I heard that she tried to defend me. She never loved me.

Some other things were told to me but I just went through the motions. I didn't even register what was happening. But in the end I ended up back in the rental car staring at the steering wheel until it suddenly hit me.

A couple of tears started to roll down my face before I broke down sobbing. The type of sobbing that shook your whole body, made you feel sick, gave you a splitting headache and turned your whole face into a splotchy red mess. It was ugly. I honestly couldn't even say how long I cried. I had lost all of sense of time when I had entered that prison.

Eventually the sobs no longer shook my body as much as they did before. The nausea faded, but the splitting headache remained. The numbness had disappeared and I could see everything normally again.