I saw it all the time in the hospital. Some patients lingered on the verge of death without truly living or dying. When they finally passed, their families mourned, but they were also relieved that their loved one’s suffering had ended. They didn’t say it, but I saw it in their eyes.
Grief wasn’t one emotion; it was a hundred emotions wrapped in a dark shroud.
Jules’s situation wasn’t quite the same, but the principle remained.
“Trust me. I’m a doctor,” I added with a half smile. “I know everything.”
My chest glowed at her soft laugh. Two laughs in less than an hour. I viewed that as a win.
“Were you close to your mom?” she asked. “Before…”
My smile faded. “Yeah. She was the best until the divorce. It got so nasty, and she became erratic. Moody. And when she was framed for trying to kill Ava...well, you know what happened.” A lump of emotion lodged itself in my throat. “Like most people, I thought she tried to drown Ava. The doctors and police chalked it up to a mental break, but I still refused to talk to her for weeks after. We’d barely reconciled before she overdosed on antidepressants.”
Jules’s face softened with sympathy. “Sounds similar to my story. The beginning, at least.” She traced the rim of the mug with her finger. “My mom and I were close when I was a kid. My dad left before I was born, so it was only the two of us. She loved dressing me up and parading me around town like I was a doll or an exclusive accessory. I didn’t mind—I loved playing dress-up, and it made her happy. But when I got older, I started getting more attention than she did, especially from men, and she hated it. She never said it, but I could see it in her eyes every time someone complimented me. She stopped treating me like her daughter and started treating me like I was her competition.”
Jesus. “She was jealous of her own daughter?”
I tried to keep the condemnation out of my voice, considering the woman had just died, but my stomach churned at the idea that a mother would compete with her child.
Jules let out a humorless laugh. “That’s the thing about my mom. She was used to being the center of attention. Homecoming queen, prom queen, beauty queen. She won a bunch of pageants when she was younger and never got over her glory days. She was beautiful even when she was older, but she couldn’t stand notbeing the most beautiful person in the room.”
She took a deep breath. “My mom pursued modeling instead of attending college, but she never made it big. After she had me, the jobs dried up, and she became a cocktail waitress. Our town was cheap. We would’ve had an okay lifestyle, but she had a huge spending problem and racked up a bunch of credit card debt on clothes, makeup, beauty services…basically anything that helped her keep up appearances. Our bills fell by the wayside. There were some days when the only real food I ate was in the school cafeteria, and many days when I would come home, terrified that would be the day we got evicted.”
I rubbed Jules’s back with soothing strokes even as my jaw tensed at the description of her childhood.
Who the fuck would choose makeup and clothing over food for their kid?
But I’d witnessed enough ugliness in the world to know those people existed, and it made me sick that Jules had grown up with one of them.
“When I was thirteen, she got the attention of Alastair, the richest man in town, when he visited the bar where she worked,” Jules continued, “They got married a year later. We moved to a big house, I received a generous allowance, and it seemed like all our problems were solved. But Alastair always…” The short pause was long enough for dread to solidify my insides. “...watched me and said things that made me wildly uncomfortable, like how nice my legs were or how I should wear skirts more often. But he didn’t touch me, and I didn’t want people to think I was overreacting to a few compliments, so I didn’t say anything. Then one night, when I was seventeen and my mom was out with her friends, he came into my room and…”
I stilled. “And what?” The words vibrated with such eerie calm it was hard to believe they came out of my mouth.
“He said all this stuff about how I should be more grateful for everything he’s done for me and my mom, and then he said I could show him how grateful I was by…you know.”
Rage clouded my vision and painted the world in a film of bloody red. Darkness stirred in my chest, insidious in how slowly it uncoiled, like a monster lulling its prey into a false sense of security before it attacked.
“What happened after that?” Still calm, still flat, though razored tension ran sharp beneath my words.
“Of course, I said no. I yelled at him to get out and threatened to tell my mom what he said. He just laughed and said she’d never believe me. Then he tried to kiss me. I tried pushing him off, but he was too strong. Luckily…” Her mouth twisted at the word. “My mom came home early and caught us before he could…do anything else. He spun some story about how I’d tried to seduce him, and she believed him. She called me a whore for trying to seduce her husband and kicked me out that night.”
The rage pulsed harder in my gut, expanding and intensifying until it shattered any morals I might’ve had.
I became a doctor to save lives, but I wanted to slice Alastair’s skin off his body, strip by strip, and watch the life bleed from his eyes.
“I was able to withdraw enough money to scrape by for a few weeks before Alastair froze my accounts,” Jules said. “I, um, worked odd jobs around town until college. After graduation, I left and haven’t gone back since.”
“Where’s Alastair now?”
God help him if I ever found him, because I had zero compunction about turning my murderous fantasy into reality.
When it came to monsters who preyed on young girls or anyone I cared about, I didn’t give a shit about the law. The law wasn’t always justice.
“He died my junior year of college,” Jules said. “House fire. I was still tracking what was happening back home at the time—call it morbid curiosity—and the news made it into the local papers. There were rumors of arson, but the police couldn’t find any hard evidence, so the case went cold.”
Alastair’s death should’ve placated me, but it only pissed me off more. I didn’t care if he’d burned alive; the bastard got off too fucking easy.
“My mom was out with friends at the time, so she was fine, but it turned out Alastair left her a pittance,” Jules continued. “I’m not sure where the rest of his fortune went, but of course, my mom spent her inheritance within a year. She went from having everything to having nothing again.” A bitter smile touched her lips. “That was also in the local papers. When you’re as rich as Alastair was, in a town as small as Whittlesburg, everything that happens to you and your family is news.”
A muscle ticked in my jaw. “And no one questioned the fact that they threw a seventeen-year-old out to fend for herself?”
“No. The townspeople made up their own rumors about how I was stealing from Alastair to fund my drug habit,” she said flatly. “How they tried to get me help but it didn’t work, they were at their wits’ end, so on and so forth.”
Jesus fucking Christ.