You Had Me At -- ON HOLD --

Chapter 1

Author Note: Just a quick note from me. This book has a bit of a darker theme (I won't post that otherwise it would be a spoiler.) So from the outset, you'll probably notice that. 

Also, this book will only be updated once a month. So please, don't ask about more frequent updates. If you want to read a book that will be updated more often (at least twice week), check out my other new work called Forbidden Flirt. It's got a fun theme and lots of drama! I plan to start updating that next week (September 12, 2022).

I had to stop running. I'd been running for so long I wasn't sure if I'd ever be able to stop. I had run from my family, my husband, and my own mind. My life was poisoning me and then slowly consuming what was left. I took pleasure in nothing, and pain and despair was my constant companion. In only my late twenties, I felt as though life had given me all it could afford.

I watched as people made future plans while I looked to the future as more suffering to endure. I laugh at those who say live for the moment. I have lived for the moment, down to every second. I can't look forward to the next day or the next moment. I was frozen in minutes and hours as they slowly slipped away. My only salvation was sleep and in the morning, those fears and anxieties come flooding back, creating a whirlpool that seemingly resumed that pattern of my life.

And so I decided to stop running.

I decided to stop and face my adversary, whatever or whoever that may be, I still didn't know. To my own chagrin, it was not my husband or my parents. It was not the life I'd carved out for myself, or all the work I had thrown myself into. My fiercest opponent was myself. I had let emotions and feelings take over my life. I had allowed myself to fall into the depths of depression and only I could crawl out of that deep, unrelenting pit of self-loathing.

I decided to take back my life, or at least I tried. I left my old life behind and opted to create a new one. A life that would not include my parents, or my husband, or even any of my old friends. I wanted nothing to remind me of the previous four years. I wanted to box up those memories so tight that when I did have to revisit them again, they would be quieted, hopefully to never roar back to life again.

Charlotte, North Carolina

I picked a city where no one would know me, and far away from my hometown. I moved there in the summer, to a condo I had fallen in love with almost immediately when I'd viewed the online listing. I'd called the agent, flown in, looked at the place, and bought it. The condo was in uptown, a place I hoped I wanted to be, and in order to secure the only remaining condo on the top floor, I had to write a composition for the owner detailing why I felt they should choose me as a tenant. Fortunately, writing had always been my forte and when I had received the letter of my acceptance, I was elated.

The condo was only a ten-minute walk from the university where I'd taken a job as an associate professor, and it was a quiet neighborhood, a perfect place to remain anonymous.

The building had only ten floors. I was to learn from a couple on the ninth floor during an elevator ride that the first two floors were leased out to commercial tenants. There was an advertising firm there along with a graphic design company and a computer software team. The other floors were used as homes much like mine. The condo I'd purchased—at a very hefty sum—had never been lived in and was completely bare, with the exception of some hardwood floors and kitchen appliances. The building had only four units per floor, divided in half with two condos on one side of the elevator. I'd seen the people living on the other side of the elevator. They were both married couples that I didn't bother to mingle with. Couple friends didn't normally hang out with singles. That much I knew to be true. So other than polite hellos, I didn't go out of my way to get to know them.