The scent of a burning something wafts towards me and pulls me out of whatever stupor I was in.
Fuck.
I quickly round the corner to the kitchen and find the stove completely off and clean pans stacked to dry on the granite island.
An exhausted sigh rattles out of me.
With Esther worrying about Will's guardians, I have been worrying about Esther.
It's eating me.
She does nothing but abide by the shittiest rules laid out to her by none other than the Bakers and she still gets almost nothing.
My old work laptop found its way into my hands as I made myself comfortable at the bar side of the island. My fingers moved quicker than my thoughts, and I told myself to stop, I really tried, but I didn't.
Well, I did.
He did 't.
To my shock and equal surprise, images and videos and how-to guides pour over the screen.
They all read or demonstrated how to fix a split brake line.
Their car? Really?
The faintest of a chuckle sounded off in the corner of my ear.
Hm.
Curiosity killed me.
I am the cat.
I knew better than to look these things up out of the blue. There had to be the problem I was researching.
'Mice are starting to burrow.'
Mice?
Any rodents, really...
I clicked on a video of a burly man with a grey beard and a blue mechanic jumpsuit on, 'How to identify brake line damage - A tutorial', it was titled.
Now all I needed to justify this being in my digital footprint was a brake line problem.
Although I didn't want anything to happen to my dear truck outside, it had to be done.
I sifted through my tools in the attached garage and got to work with a pair of wire strippers on my own brake line to mimic gnawing patterns.
This was going to be a long day.
•
I wasn't sure of where I was at.
There are so many wires and connectors and shit.
My body was angled weird, my back hurt, and the pliers in my hand were definitely getting something in their jowls.
What it was? No idea.
What if Esther caught me doing this?
'She'd go be with Johnson.'
"Oh shut the fuck up," I mumbled to literally nobody but myself.
'She would drag him to your bed and make you watch–'
My hand slipped and I lost the pliers to the blackness that was the pit of my hood, or so I thought until they clattered in the cement floor of the garage.
Vehicles are hollow...?
'What man doesn't know about cars?'
YOU ARE READING
Façade
Romance// 18+ // A convicted murderer, Esther Lynn Able, falls for a killer who struggles to identify reality from his overwhelming mind, and the man's life threatens to ruin her own. Hoping that all it took was a move to a rural town to get his life back...
