Regret - A Short Story

Regret

The woman stormed furiously to the door. "Jen, you're being unreasonable!" Her husband argued.
"I'm being unreasonable!?" Jen screamed. "Stop accusing me! You're being unreasonable! I can't take this! I don't want to be here!"
"Fine! Leave, then!"
"I'm leaving!"
"You only care about yourself!"
"Shut up! I'm leaving now! I don't want to see you again!"
The mahogany door swung shut, but not without giving Jen a glimpse of two terrified children cowering and crying at the top of the carpeted stairs. She heard a sniffle on the other side of the door and she brushed the wood with her fingertips, a cry swelling up in her throat.

Jen barely made it to the hotel room before the tears fell from her eyes. What had she done? What had she said? What were they even fighting about? She struggled to remember, a tense and angry cry erupting from her throat.

Time passed in and out of exhausted sleep. Every time she woke her pillow was a little more damp, and she hadn't received any texts. She would spend the awake crying, too, but the weariness that her emotions brought to her drew her heavy eyelids shut.

It was 6:05 when Jen woke. Dull orange light painted the ceiling as the sun started to set. She stared at it for a while as a pang of sadness and perhaps a bit of loneliness settled over her heart like a cold and heavy blanket. Jen picked up her phone, but was only greeted with the flashing of an empty battery icon. She threw down the phone and curled into a tight ball.

At 7:13, Jen reasoned that she might as well go back. She should apologize and talk it through. Plus, the hotel bed wasn't nearly as comforting as the warm embrace of the one she loved. She left the hotel room and, wishing to avoid contact, opted the long walk back to her house. To home. She felt a little better now, knowing that everything would be talked out like it always was. The rest of the walk was a serious of imagined scenarios of how everything would play out, and the loving kisses that she would surely give her husband for the things she had said the previous night.

She was so deep in thought that she nearly broke through a band of yellow caution tape. She looked up, her confused expression quickly becoming one of horror. Jen felt her heart sink rapidly as her eyes pooled with tears. "Are you alright, miss?" An officer said. But she did not notice, because at that moment, suddenly, she remembered that the argument had started in the kitchen while she was cooking. She remembered that, as the argument moved away from the kitchen, she hadn't turned off the stove. She realized, in the most unforgiving and cruel way, that in her anger she hadn't noticed the faint smell of smoke as she stormed out of the house. Through the moving bodies of policemen and firefighters, her eyes fixated on three tarps -one lump was significantly larger in stature than the others -laying in the driveway. Jen felt her body collapse and screamed as her heart shattered completely. She screamed and wailed for quite some time, recalling every memory from the past twelve years: from the first date, to the wedding, and to the births of the children. The policemen tried to calm her down, and the on-lookers gasped as they realized who she was. "She must be heartbroken," they said. "She must be devastated." These ideas were all correct, however...

Above anything else, Jennifer Hughes felt regret as she cried in front of the charred remains of her house and the dead bodies of her dear family.