SHE

7. A Snapshot

Adelaide was the kind of person that had been anxious for a very long time, she hadn't always been like that. There was something that had caused her to grow an anxious temperment when she was a child, and she also considered this one of the reasons that she buried herself in escapism as well. She thought about it now as she stared at the blank page that she needed to fill. The first event that had driven her into a shell was one that she could only remember the outline of. Her child psychologist had told her that people tend to do that when they experienced something very traumatic, but to not be surprised if she remembered bits and pieces of it.

She remembered pieces of it now.

She was a little girl when her mother and father were fighting with each other. Her father was sick. He had been for a long time. He had told her it was just a cold that had lasted for a very long time, but she would later learn that her mother had been poisoning him for a very long time, wanting him to die so that she could take the insurance money from him.

He had been mildly sick for a little while. But he started getting worse and worse and that night he started rapidly declining from the once vibrant and jovial man that she knew. It would always hurt her heart because he would take her away from her mother and provide her this safe space to read and think and feel safe. One that her mother had never provided from her.

As he started to decline, she witnessed the two of them fight more and more. She was never sure about what, because she was a child, and there were a lot of very adult fights going on that no child had to reference.

She watched from the door of her room, it was barely open, so no one noticed that she was watching. They never noticed that she was watching.

She wished that they had.

At one point, she slapped him.

She had been hitting him for a very long time and he could never do anything about it because despite him being sick, he was still bigger than her, and if she called the police and said that he was the one who started it they would believe him. Adelaide stifled back a sob. Tears welling up in her eyes, making her   vision blur.

Blood rushed in her ears and she watched her mother hit him over and over and over.

Well, she couldn't keep seeing that. So she walked oved to the safe. She had seen her father open it before so she knew the code. She wasn't thinking clearly at the time. How could she be? She was nine years old and her father was in danger.

She shot and killed her mother that night.

She remembered her father screaming and crying after that night. He blamed her, despite the fact that she had arguably just saved his life.

That was just one of the first memories that had made her the way she was today. Something that she had buried as soon as she was old enough and had enough money to hire the right people.