Blanca Like Snow

Chapter 28 - Worst

The conversation with Will has me thinking the whole day. About many, many things. I do think about him and these fluttering feelings, but I realise my minds is mostly consumed by my family. Or what I have left of family.

Minds are a wonderful thing and the extents they go to protect us is truly marvellous. They block, filter and provide the exact things we can deal with at the moment. All this going on is maybe too much for me. Scratch the maybe, it is definitely too much for me. If I tried to process it all, then I would collapse. I have to live with the constant threat and the fear of seeing my end when I get discovered, a fear I didn't even fathom I could ever experience.

However, a thing I've overlooked, or maybe suppressed would be a more accurate verb, is my family.

The few times I mentioned contacting my family, the answer was the same: it's dangerous. Laura must be monitoring them, waiting for me to make that mistake. I accepted that, maybe I shouldn't have. While I deal with all this truth and conspiracy, all they know is that I'm dead. Despite how distant we are, how I barely consider my mother as my mother but just like someone who gave birth to me, she must still be hurting. And I'm not doing anything to stop that, to help her.

Wouldn't be more merciful to tell her... to tell them I'm alive, I'm just hiding? Trying to stay safe?

There's a thing that not everyone knows or have accepted, but it's a universal truth: money can do anything. You don't need to make the perfect crime, you just need the money to buy every person's ethics to cover up for you. You just need the right connections.

Out of all the things that get out in the public, there are five, eight, ten times more things that will never be undisclosed because money covers them up.

Money and connections bought the people at the morgue who made another girl pass for me. Money bought the police to close the case. Money and connections are keeping Laura as the CEO. She surely is making deals with the other shareholders, bribing them all so they won't kick her out.

Money is power.

Money is keeping me here and my family under the illusion that I am dead.

The world is such an ugly and messed up place... and my mother, the only direct family I have left, thinks she's lost her only daughter.

"Nora," I call when she's trimming my hair after lunch. "¿No puedo llamar a mi mamá?" I ask in Spanish if I can call my mum. For some reason, speaking in my first language, with a shaky voice, makes me sound like I was five all over again.

"Blanca," she sighs. "¿Por qué preguntas algo de lo que ya sabes la respuesta?" she replies in Spanish for me: Why do you ask for something you already know the answer for? then switches to English. "If she knows, then it's sure Laura will find out, too."

"But Laura knows I'm alive! She staged my dead and brought that body to pretend to be me," I exclaim, turning to glare at my best friend, my hair falling from her fingers. "Telling my mum that won't make a difference."

Nora sighs while I only feel more frustrated with the situation. "The more people know you're hiding, the more dangerous."

"I won't tell her where I am!" I protest, my voice raising so loud it hurts my throat. "Just that I'm alive, that I'm all right."

My voice breaks at the end of that sentence as I feel tears welling up in my eyes, making them sting. I blink quickly, trying to get rid of such annoying feeling.

"Calls get tracked. Are you going to go somewhere else to make that call? You think she's not bugged? Don't you think she won't coming running to find you? You think she won't call Laura to tell her you're alive? What will Laura do if your mum calls her with that news?"