Love isn't easy

Chapter 25: December 20, 2018

December 20th, 2018

Lisa bolts awake and instinctively pats the empty half of the hotel room bed. She's covered in sweat and struggles to catch her breath.

"It was a dream. It was a dream. Just a dream Lisa."

Lisa chants in an attempt to calm herself down. She turns to look at the clock. 4:09 AM. She groans loudly and buries her face in her hands. In a matter of seconds, she's flicking the covers off her body, turning on the lamp that rests on the bedside table, and getting out of bed. She heads for the desk on the opposite side of the room, pulls out the chair she had tucked in just a few hours ago, sits, and cracks open the folder that rests on the very top. Revisiting this is nothing short of masochistic because Lisa knows that is the same folder that contains the pictures that have been haunting her for weeks.

For the past four months, Lisa has been working on a really nuanced and demanding high-profile case. It was a gruesome attempted murder-suicide that left a mother and her two young daughters dead. The husband and perpetrator survived. He's now standing trial for the triple murder of every member of his direct family. Lisa is the lead prosecutor going up against a defense trying their best to work towards a "not guilty by reason of insanity" verdict. Lisa's main objective is to prevent that from happening.

The murders took place in the stock broker's fancy Manhattan apartment, but Lisa had to travel upstate for further discovery of damning evidence. The family had a vacation home in the mountains and that's where the prosecution believed the detailed and methodical planning of the murders happened. Lisa also had a theory that the purchases of the gun and the axe used to commit the crimes were made in that city.

Lisa had been gone from Manhattan since right after Thanksgiving break. Along with Fox and Nicholas, she had been in this skiing resort town and away from home for three weeks now as the team tried to piece together the months leading up to the night of the murders. Lisa has spent twenty-two days pouring over the case files and particularly the crime scene photos. She's had to dissect the endless photos of two little girls shot by their own father from every possible angle. When she wasn't looking at those, Lisa was analyzing home videos of when the victims used to be happy scouring for something she can use as evidence. Lisa knows she should be looking at these critically, but she can't help but draw parallels between those two little girls and her own daughters. Those little girls serve as hourly reminders that she's away from her girls and from Roseanne. Lisa has long stopped being able to not see those crime photos and connect them to her family. Because of this, Lisa cries herself to sleep for three straight weeks. Lisa would never admit this to Roseanne when they Skype every day though. Each day Roseanne asks what's wrong and without fail, Lisa avoids having to explain that she isn't entirely sure if she shouldn't recuse herself from this case because she's far from being impartial. Lisa hates the man. She abhors him and the things he did to his own children. Lisa can't understand how anyone could do that when she can't fathom hurting her own even in hypothetical scenarios.

Lisa doesn't have to say any of this, Roseanne can tell something's off. The bags under Lisa's eyes are a clear indication. On top of that, Lisa seems cold and withdrawn. Lisa won't admit to Roseanne that she's being distant because she's been having vivid and horrifying nightmares of coming home and finding her wife and daughters in the same positions as the mom and the kids lay on the crime scene photos she has to keep looking at. Lisa can't explain how she can see them - Roseanne, Coraline, and Annie - covered in blood, with glassy eyes, and gelid skin. Lisa won't go into the fact that sometimes she wakes up and swears she can taste the smell of blood and death in her mouth. It's not something she would ever share with Roseanne.

Tonight, instead of thinking about Roseanne and all the things she's not sharing, Lisa sits at the hotel desk and flips through the pages of the files on her desk. She had grown accustomed to being irritated at the inconvenient fact that she didn't seem capable of getting through more than a few hours of sleep, but tonight Lisa feels slightly more at ease even with the nightmares. Her work away from Manhattan is done, at least for a while, and in the morning she gets to go home.