Don't Hold Your Breath

Prologue

            It never made sense to me how a girl could give up her entire life for a man. I could never understand that level of devotion to a person that would allow them any degree of control. In my life, I always had to be the one in control. It was how I was raised; or rather it was how I raised myself.

It worried my foster parents how unresponsive I was to emotions like friendship and gestures of kindness and love, but it was just how I was. They had tried to send me to therapists but there was nothing to fix. I was perfectly fine. You can't fix something that isn't broken, I was just a quiet and introspective person.

Don't get me wrong, I wasn't cold and unemotional, I loved my foster parents very much and will forever be indebted to them. I had heard horror stories of kids in the system finding a family that hurt them in some way. I was lucky in that they treated me like one of their own three children, raising me with just as much love, and just as much fair discipline.

They had been the third family I stayed with and after I had landed with them when I was 14, I never left. The other two families both followed a similar pattern of taking me in as some sort of charity project, but they would find out the little girl they had brought home actually required some effort to deal with. They got sick of their little project and would give me back to the system.

When I found myself with the Anderson's, I had expected them to follow this pattern as well. I was pleasantly surprised to find that they dealt with me with a little more finesse and patience. I grew to love them, and I especially grew to love their two young daughters and their son who only ever treated me as a welcome older sister in their lives. I felt they were the only human contact I needed. I never reached out for a friend, or anything beyond that, and it was that which worried my foster parents. They didn't understand how I could live life in such a lonely fashion.

They didn't understand that I liked it better this way.

But even though I couldn't see the point in loving a man, I did see the benefits of it. The Anderson's loved each other dearly. Paul and Diana, my foster parents, were almost sickeningly in love even after 25 years of marriage, and they celebrated their happiness by openly giving all they had to everyone around them. With Paul being a lawyer and Diana a surgeon, they were well off in the money department and they enjoyed spoiling me. For my sixteenth birthday they bought me an Audi, and when I got into an accident a year later and totaled it they bought me another one.

I didn't realize it at the time, but that car would be the reason that three years later I'd be finding myself in a position that I hated more than anything; without any control over my life.

And it all started with a trip to the jewelry store two days before Mother's Day.