The Search for Life

Chapter 9

"I just can't understand why you're so obsessed with her. It's honestly unhealthy."

"It's not unhealthy to want revenge on the woman who killed your father! I think that if anything, you're the sick one for not wanting justice! Dad was your soulmate! You always said that. Surely your marriage must've meant something."

"Of course it meant something, Jules! My goodness, I loved your father more than just about anybody in the whole world! And it's okay to be angry – hurt, even – but all this? I mean, what is all this?"

The two women stared up at a wall littered with notes and photos and newspaper clippings regarding one subject, and one subject only. The woman named Jules sighed deeply and hovered weightlessly over the pages, turning one or another over, and investigating pictures she had searched countless times before. "This is my work, Mom," she groaned. "Remember that job I said I had? This is it. Like it or not, I've been working really hard on this I'm not letting it go. Not now. Especially not now."

Jules's mother brought her hand to her collar and rubbed a silver pendant between her fingertips. "What do you mean, 'especially not now?'"

"I mean what I said!" She snapped.

Her mother stopped rubbing the pendant and raised her eyebrows at her daughter.

She bashfully shifted her gaze and backtracked. "She hurt people, Mom. And not just Dad. There were others..." Jules snatched a piece of paper that had been her center of attention for the previous few days and held it out to her mother.

Her mother narrowed her eyes and read the headline. Her heart softened and so did her gaze as her hand dropped from her collar and she relaxed her posture. "I see," her mother muttered.

"You said you thought she could change...'" Jules trailed. "But people like her don't change. Why would they? They have no reason to, unless someone makes them." .

"That's enough, Jules," her mother said.

Her daughter watched her with pain and floated nearer to her.

"I don't want you talking like that. I don't care what she's done, this isn't the way."

"But Mom, she—"

"I don't care what she did!" Her mother snapped.

Jules quieted in her surprise.

Her mother softened again and shook her head. "This isn't about her. This is about you, and I won't let you to be made a murderer by another. I'm putting up the barrier."

Jules's eyes lit up and she took to the ground again. "No! You can't do this to me – you can't keep treating me like a little kid! I'm twenty years old now – I'm not a child!"

"Well then, stop acting like one," her mother told her as she crossed over to the door and exited the room.

Jules followed her out as she cut across the mossy garden to a wrought iron gate. The entire acre of property was encircled with waist high fencing and the gate marked the only obvious entrance or exit. The entire time her mother paced smoothly from rock to rock, Jules pleaded at her side for a change in mind.

"Please," Jules begged. "You don't understand. Dad—"

"Your father never would have wanted this," her mother warned, cutting her gaze to her child as she reached out a hand for the gate.

"That's not true!" She protested, tears coming to her eyes. "You don't know what he would have wanted because he's dead! She killed him, and he's dead, and so you don't know--"