Page 103 of Marcus

She couldn’t explain.

The memories were back again.

Killing her again.

“You can’t just leave—Marcus is going to ask for you, Cella.”

“I have to go,” she repeated firmly.

Chris let go of her wrist, his expression disgusted. She hadn’t even realized he’d been holding onto her. That’s how numb she felt from the terror wrapping around her like a cobra ready to slowly suffocate her to death.

“Ma, I want to see Marcus,” Tiffany said quietly.

Cella kept walking.

“Are you running?” Chris called behind her. “What, shit gets tough, Cella, and you have to run? Is that it?”

Fuck him, too.

He was probably just as pissed as she was. Just as scared. Except he didn’t know her fear.

This pain.

He didn’t know it.

And she wouldn’t explain.

“Ma, I want Marcus,” Tiffany said, watery eyes staring up at her.

Tiffany had been too young that day to ask for her father as they sat in a hospital waiting room while they cried for a man who was already gone. Today, she could ask.

How was Cella supposed to deal with that?

Cella still couldn’t talk.

Her own tears had finally started coming.

Cella made it across the border a little past twelve at night. It took her longer than she expected to grab all of their shit at Marcus’s place. She barely managed to get her composure to face the border agent who asked for her passport and reason for coming back into the states, along with the request to declare if she had purchased anything in Canada that she was bringing back.

Somehow, she kept her tears at bay.

While still dying inside.

At some point, Tiffany stopped asking for Marcus. Maybe because she noticed that the more she asked for him, the harder Cella would cry.

Yes.

God, yes, she wanted to turn the car back around and give her daughter exactly what she asked for. She wanted nothing more than that man who she was sure had finally been granted visitors, which he expected to be them, amongst many others. They wouldn’t be there.

Because Chris had been right.

Cella ran.

Tiffany, the sweet girl she was, so fucking loved by her mother, forever Cella’s very best friend because that kid sometimes felt like all she had in the world, decided to try calming her mother down. As though that was her job.

All it served to do was make Cella feel like a shitty fucking mother.

Her kid fell asleep just before the border.