On a late Saturday night, when Lucy should be welcoming him with his usual hot coffee, a tight smile on her face and a fresh buddle of complaints, Aiden Carter finds himself welcomed by a dreadful silence and the news of his wife running away with h...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
Jace's eyes shine with satisfaction and excitement, though both the expressions are tangled with curiosity and a hunger to know more. Having found out another piece of Lucy, I feel breathless and for a quite long moment, I can't speak. Thousands of words but I can't think of a thing.
Jace breaks the silence like he always does.
'This makes sense. She always planned everything. And these pages, this story, it's leading us somewhere. Somewhere...' He takes a deep breath, his voice trailing off, hardly able to control his eagerness. 'For a start, how did you know it was this book?'
I can't peel my eyes off it, I want to hug it to my chest and drown in the ocean of sadness. But that's the last thing I can do. I've never been a survivor in such a situation where I've got this little choice and have to do so much against my will. I heave a sigh.
'It's about the woman abused by their husbands. She read that one aloud and I remember the story. It made her cry. She said that the heartache would never go away until eventually, we had to head out to have a late-night dessert to make up for the sad emotions bursting through her heart.'
Jace smiles. 'She seems like the sort of person you read about in books. Sensitive, beautiful and different. I've quite never heard of a woman like her.'
'Lucy was different.' I reflect on what once was and though my heart aches, it sorts of spreads warmth inside me as well, reminiscing.
'She loved midnights. She would get out of bed at two-thirty to search for her diary because she would suddenly feel poetic. We often had late-nights desserts, mostly thick slices of chocolate cakes, for treats. Whenever one of us felt sad, we ate chocolate. Lucy used to love chocolate so much that she ate a big bar every day, and I would stare at her and wonder how she could get addicted to it that badly.'
'She used to get addicted to stuff?' Jace asks with that curious look again, that one that makes me wonder what's going on in his head.
'Pretty much. She read as the world depended on it, often getting so lost in the book, I would have to shake her shoulders to get her to listen to me. When she got addicted to cakes, we had so many, that we had to walk for hours every day to make up for it. She liked to stay fit, but she ate as if she tasted more than the food. I don't know how to describe it.' I rub my neck. 'When she made up her mind to do something, she devoted her entire soul to it.'
I put the paperback in the book, and decide to take it back home with me. Another broken piece of my perfect wife to take home, where she should be, waiting for me and yet she's gone like she is never meant to be found. My heart races at that thought, I hope she didn't take the meant to be the line of hers too seriously.
'That could mean that once she decided to run away, she planned it all. Seven missed calls, right? All while the shooting was going on and you couldn't possibly pick them up. Then the messy room that implied struggle but no fingerprints found. And now these torn pages of her diary, and her story. There was a reason behind all this. I can't get my head around it-'
