We’d developed a casual friendship, my survival buddy and me.
I imagined my generous mountain neighbor even knew my most precious secret: that Bradley had been visiting me at the chalet once a month for most of the past year. He never asked, but I knew he could see everything at the top of my mountain. The only secrets I had in this world were the ones I carried in my heart.
Bradley thought he knew my everythings, but there are some things best left unspoken, especially among lovers.
Bradley still asked me to marry him almost every time he visited the chalet, and rain, snow or sunshine he brought the engagement ring he’d purchased long ago and asked me on bended knee.
I never said no.
The truth was that I wanted with all of me to marry him, but I couldn’t put his life in danger more than it was. I let him think what he chose to about my life, but I refused to reveal any of the details I’d come to discover in all of my months of digging into the history of my own past. The secrets that lived and breathed within families struck me in a new way. The secrets among the powerful existed at an entirely new level.
I was determined to have my revenge on my captor, word by word I would reveal with excruciating detail what I knew about my mother’s existence before and leading up to the night of her death. One handwritten note and scribbled calendar date at a time.
Revenge is a plate best served cold, and I had the patience to dole my scandals out slowly.
I’d been off all of my traditional prescription medications for a year, my solace turned inward as I wrote my memories and nightmares out furiously on the page. Every day felt like a trauma-inducing rollercoaster of déjà vu until I inevitably found myself knee-deep in my mother’s personal items in search of answers. Instead I found more questions. Medical records and journals filled with fastidiously written accounts of abuses she’d encountered over her life, some the drafts that would later become some of her most-read articles online. She was a sensation in women’s rights circles, and I’d been none the wiser.
Maybe my own life would end this way, a dizzying array of questions and false leads so confusing that even those that loved me would wonder who I’d been. Sometimes it takes dying for people to start listening.
I thought of the baby that’d taken it’s first and last heartbeats inside of my body. Tears hovered at my eyelids as I thought of what could have been, if only. Tav went to every prenatal appointment, held my hand through each and every teardrop I’d shed when I lost my child, but Bradley also believed my baby was his.
The truth was my mind had blacked out the memories. I’d struggled with regressive therapy to beckon them back, but I’d locked away every intimate interaction after coping with so much loss. I’d started new medical therapies and counted every breath as I feared I might die of grief if I didn’t.
I hated life.
Steph had brought me out of the darkness when she’d invited me out to dinner and drinks, Bradley stopping over to handle the lawn maintenance each week gave me a moment of lightheartedness to look forward to. It took all of them to bring me back to life, and now I suffered alone without them most of the days.
I’d thought of calling Steph a hundred times, but I couldn’t bring myself to involve her in my upside down world.
Instead, I stayed busy with investigating my mother’s accident. Choosing to pour over the details in the medical examiner and crime scene investigator’s reports one sentence at a time. According to the crime scene report her blood alcohol level was high, the accident that caused fire to ignite in her front living room was preventable and tragic.
But the medical examiner’s report told a different story.
My mother’s body was saved from the flames by a mattress. It seemed plausible that the ceiling had collapsed in her small bungalow after the flames ate away at the structural beams, but the medical examiner also found a bullet wound. A small knick in her neck from a .22 caliber firearm that indicated an assassination-style fatal shot.
The mattress protected her from the fire, the bullet had already stolen her life.
She hadn’t lit the fire that consumed her home, it was only meant to destroy evidence. Destroy the past. A history. A life.
My mother’s life ended under a mattress, a fate we shared—mine at the beginning of my life, and hers at the end.
I moved back to my keyboard and considered my next words, knowing I would reveal the discrepancies in the police report. It was only a matter of time.
Before I could form my next sentence, a beep alerted me to a new message on my encrypted messaging app.
I smiled, Bradley’s warm smile on my mind.
I opened my phone screen, ready to find Bradley’s daily message when a message from an unknown Colorado number popped up.
Freya, can we talk? It’s me.
A chill ran through me. Bradley had been calling me Shelly for over a year now, never once had he faltered and used my old name.
Just then a voice message lit up my screen.
I sucked in a breath and hit play.
“Hey, Freya. It’s me.”
