𝐀𝐝𝐚𝐫𝐚 Marsden, beloved wife to the best man ever and soon to be mother wasn't expecting much. She finally had it made, and that's saying something for a former, poor introvert with a broken home. But there was one thing she didn't expect. In fa...
Sara Sleimen didn't keep her maiden name just because he left her, nor for her religious tradition; no she kept it for her daughters and for herself, for she firmly believed that a man shouldn't have all the glory of carrying on the family name. So through her life, in one fell swoop she proved her father that she mattered with or without a man. She then, in raising her daughters passed on words of her 'wisdom', biased in a way that can only be taught through heartbreak, true in a way that was only met through experience.
'Watch out for the good ones,' she would say. I think after a succession of bad ones that went in and out of our humble home like a turnstile made me doubt every word of hers. They never did treat her right and when things got too close to their liking they'd run off with their pants barely up their ass cracks and their dignity three sheets to the wind. I think the last one my mum ever took before she gave up her life to her new, herbier soulmate left with my college money.
This wasn't a poverty thing, if that's what you're thinking. Mother's beginning may have been humble but as a surgeon she didn't want for money, but what she had in a sparkling career she lacked in love.
In my late teens I once summoned the courage to ask what she meant, why she thought a good guy was worse than this loveless search. She looked at me, stone cold sober, like a switch flicked on from her drug haze and said that it was a good guy who got her into this mess in the first place.
'Don't let them trick you, Addy,' she said, 'they hurt you without meaning to, and that's the worst kind.'
I then lived with the 'good guy' after her passing. My rich father who left mother for his blue blood wife. I think mother ruined me, because I always looked at his kind smiles, his gifts and love with suspicion. But then again, at my most destitute time I met Blake.
Now, for this absolute crises I needed him more than ever. I clutch onto the fragile clippings of five years ago as my knuckles turn white. Cold seeps into my bones as my mind unscrambles the short events of last week to decipher what the hell happened. Was I abducted and drugged? Mia too? Where we put in a car and dragged to the bottom of the river? No, that was recent. We had eyewitnesses that day claiming that we were a breath away from drowning and recovered from the river in the nick of time.
That happened a week ago but we went missing five years ago. So what on earth is going on? What was Mia and I travelling to London for? Or were we there the whole time living different lives before the wreck? We're we running from something? If we were than thirty other people must have been too because they went missing the exact same day of the exact same month of the exact same year in the same bloody hour. They weren't with us at UCL hospital.
