In the corner of my eye, I catch the police officer giving the mortician a look, killing the conversation.
A thick silence fills the room, various people exiting and entering. I hear the door shutting intermittently from someplace far away.
It doesn’t feel like I’m in the room anymore.
It feels like I’m floating. No matter how many times I attempt to wrap my head around all of this, it still hurts.
If I stare at my mother’s closed eyes hard enough, they might just open again.
If I shut my eyes and focus on my breathing, I might just be lucky enough to wake up in the penthouse and call this a nightmare I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy.
Any minute now, she’s going to return from the dead and strut out of here in the Louboutins she still has on her feet.
But how’s she going to do that when someone has cut a huge fucking chunk out of her face?
“Let me give you a lift back?” says the police officer.
I only hear him because he has a hand wrapped around my wrist.
I shoo him away. “I’m staying here.”
“Be my guest, but the mortician needs to move your mother on at some point.”
“She’s a human being, not a fucking shipping container.”
“Carter—”
“Don’t say my name.”
“I understand.”
It’s a waste of energy trying to explain to him that he doesn’t. Not in the slightest. A woman capable of reapplying lipstick every hour, of traveling the world and walking miles every day, doesn’t just drop dead all of a sudden.
She had no underlying health conditions.
The whole thing is a scam.
She was murdered.
Either the mortician and officers here are dumb, or lying to my face to make their jobs easier.
When the mortician starts wheeling my mother away, I have no other option but to follow the officer. Next thing I know, I find myself in the back seat of the police officer’s car watching the city fly by through the window.
When we arrive outside of my apartment block, the officer steps out of the car to help me out. I refuse his assistance—bad idea. If he wasn’t standing in front of me, I’d have fallen flat on my face.
“I’m sorry for your loss, Carter. Take it easy. You might want to start thinking about funeral arrangements. There’s a bit of a backlog at the moment.”
Of course there fucking is. Las Vegas is called Sin City for a reason.
I step into the elevator and space out watching my pale reflection in the mirror.
Did somebody do this to get to me?
Did she really have an MI?
How can it be that my world has been tipped upside down all before sunrise?
It’s a tough walk along the corridor into my apartment. When I get there, I head to my desk by default. The chair is designed for its sitter to practice good ergonomics, but I hunch up and make no effort to straighten my spine.
