Trials and Tribulations

Chapter 81

Camila couldn't sleep. She'd tried. In fact, she'd been trying ever since Lauren had dropped her home from Dinah's house almost five hours ago. Camila had tried every single trick that she knew to encourage some form of slumber; counting sheep, listening to music, reading, deep breathing but they'd all failed miserably and so she was now lying in bed, her mind sharp and alert as it considered the reason why the sleeping pills that she'd taken almost forty minutes ago still hadn't had any effect. 'It's because you didn't tell Lauren and the others about Clare's uncle,' Camila thought as she silently chastised herself for having delayed sharing with her friends the truth regarding his role in her accident. Camila groaned audibly and rolled over on to her side in bed so that she could look at the time displayed on the radio alarm clock on her nightstand. 3.21am "Ugh," she moaned, rolling on to her back again and shutting her eyes tight, one hand lifting up to rub at her left eye firmly. She could feel a slight headache starting just behind it and she knew that with the beginning of the trial later it was only likely to get worse as the day progressed. 'You fucking idiot,' Camila cursed herself inwardly for being the cause of what was now an uncommon episode of insomnia. 'You

should have told them all months ago when you and Clare first realised. You shouldn't have waited so long. What the hell were you thinking?' The truth was that she hadn't really been thinking. She'd just been happy. She'd been so happy. They all had been. 'No. They all are happy,' Camila recognised and that was the crux of the problem. Everyone was finally happy once again and after spending the last year of complicating her friend's lives with her health, with her behaviour, with her mood and the numerous dramas that seemed to follow her at every turn, Camila had, unsurprisingly, been reluctant to divulge something to them that could potentially threaten that happiness in any way. Camila glanced up at the ceiling above her bed and exhaled a deep breath slowly, her eyes falling on the picture that Sofi had drawn and given to her before she'd had to go in to hospital to have cardioversion for her irregular heartbeat. She'd followed through on the promise that she'd made to her sister and had affixed it to the ceiling the day afterwards so that she could look at it every single night before she went to sleep. The light in her room was scarce at this hour but Camila thought that she could just about make out the figures that her sister had drawn on the page and her mouth curved up in to a smile as she remembered the day that she and Sofi had gone to the park together with Lauren. 'That had been a good day,' Camila thought as she turned her head in

the bed and glanced back over at her alarm clock again, sighing to herself as she noted the time. 3.28am 'I should get up,' Camila considered, knowing that the likelihood of her being able to sleep now was extremely low seeing as she had to be up in a few hours anyway in order to get ready for court. She lay still for a few minutes longer, her hand gripping on to the top edge of her comforter in preparation to pull it back, her mind still debating whether it truly was the best course of action to take or not. 'Just get up,' she urged herself before finally throwing the covers off her and swinging her legs over the edge of the bed so that she was sitting up. She rubbed at her left eye again, the dull ache which was gnawing behind it prompting her to reach over reflexively for the bottle of painkillers on her nightstand. With her free hand Camila turned on her bedside lamp and she started reading the directions on the back of the container, deliberating the benefit of taking a couple of tablets now in order to try and tackle the headache before it had a chance to progress any further. In theory, there was no reason why Camila couldn't have any of the small white tablets but she was still reluctant to succumb to her previously routine behaviour regardless of that knowledge. It had been so long since she'd used them habitually, instead now only resorting to them when her pain was unbearable, that a part of her was irrationally worried that if she started relying on them again she'd fall back in to bad habits and wouldn't be able to function without their use. So, with all this in