Chapter Sixteen / The Promise

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“TALK TO ME

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“TALK TO ME.  Please.”

Tara acts as a sanctuary.

Ellie-Marie has thought that since the day they met.  There was something about her,  something about how she treated Ellie like a friend rather than a bug to examine under the microscope of inherited fame, that made everything else seem safer.  She didn't care about what the world thought.  She didn't care about what anyone thought,  good or bad.  She based her choices off her life, and she seemed to choose Ellie for Ellie the day they met.  They'd hugged at the end of the day after mere hours together,  Tara's perfume a little too strong in that way preteen girls always spritz it to be, and that was that.  Even her naturally trusting nature was shocked by how easily Tara Carpenter stepped into her life.

Now Ellie-Marie thinks she was always meant to be there.

She's shivering in this lobby despite the seventy-five degrees it's kept at.  The world is too loud and the lights are too bright to be anything but migraine inducing,  piercing through her eyelids as if the universe is cruelly begging her to wake up to what's happened.  Like she could forget for a millisecond when the blood of her family still stains her skin.  Like she could distract from the fact that this is proof of the worst.  Like she could be anything but a villain in her own story.  

When she woke up last year,  they'd scrubbed Dad and Abi's blood off of her.

This year there's no reason to even bother.  She escaped without a scratch.  Paramedics have bigger things to worry about because her life was spared.

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