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I drove home in a daze. I didn’t know what to do, or how to reach out to Shelly. I wasn’t sure if she was hurt. I didn’t know if she needed help of some sort. I had no idea where she was, what she was doing, or where she was going. I needed to know she was safe. I had to do whatever I could to find out what happened to her.
I called her several times again, but she didn’t respond still. I sat there in my apartment drinking beer and feeling sorry for myself. Was it me? Was it something I did? Was it something I neglected to do? What would make a woman who was seemingly happy just chuck it all and start over? I didn’t have the faintest idea what was happening.
An idea popped into my head. I grabbed the laptop and fired it up. I quickly pulled up Shelly’s social media accounts. I began digging, trying to find anything that might have been remotely relative to an explanation about what had happened to her. She had simply vanished on purpose.
It was driving me mad to discover why. After scouring her social media for over an hour, I had come up with nothing. Most of her posts were quotes and memes, and most of anything remotely meaningful was almost a year old. Shelly had never gotten too much into the modern technology of today, and for that matter, neither had I. We had other things to keep our interests, more hands on things.
It was too much to deal with. I felt like my head was going to explode. I tried to sit still, but after a few minutes I started pacing back and forth. I felt so restless. I was going insane. The fear and adrenaline was rushing through me. I felt sick all over. Somewhere out there was the woman I loved and she was on the run. She was leaving it al
l behind. Why? She might have been scared. She might have been in some kind of trouble. I had nothing to go on.
I groaned and sat back down to swig on the beer. It was the only thing keeping me at all together. I felt desperate as if I needed to call someone for help. I couldn’t call the cops. She was not missing. She’d turned in her notice at work and cancelled her lease. That was not a trouble scenario. Grown people could pack it up and leave any time they chose to do so.
There was nothing I could do about it. I just had to wait for her to contact me. But what if she didn’t? What if she was angry at me for something, or had decided that for whatever reason she did not want this life after all?
Tears stung my eyes as they began to fall down my cheeks. I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand. I felt so confused, so hurt, and so uncertain about what my future was looking like. It was maddening just not knowing what happened to the love of my life. Why would she just up and leave that way?
She had to have been unhappy somehow. There must have been so much hurt simmering underneath the surface that she just didn’t know how to deal with it. But what hurt? Was it just her past? Was it the demons she was running from? How much about the past had she not told me? I just wanted to talk to her. Didn’t she know that she could tell me anything and I would be there for her? Surely, she had to know that.
But she’d gone anyway. I had lost her. All I could do now was sit there and wait for her to contact me.
And as I sat there on the couch crying, drinking a beer, and feeling totally sorry for myself, somehow deep down, I knew that she would never come back. Nobody ran that way unless they were certain that it was what they had to do. And she had run as quickly as anyone I’d ever heard of.
I just hoped that one day she would stop running and realize that I was there waiting for her. I would always wait for her. And I would never stop loving her. I would never stop searching for her.
Chapter Eighteen
Shelly
“This is your office.”
I entered the office and looked around. It was nice. Small, but nice. Hell, I was sure that I was going to have a small little cubicle, and that was if I was lucky, but to get my own personal office was amazing. This might actually work out pretty well after all. I was starting to feel a bit better about all of this.
“Great,” I said trying my best to sound professional while not groveling at how amazed I was to have this new office with my name on the door. I was finally putting my two year communications degree to some good use, even though I was sure I was going to miss working at a fire station. That was my life, my blood, and my love. But with being pregnant, I knew that I couldn’t really do that right now. And I was gonna have to support myself some way.
“I’ll let you get settled in. We have a meeting in an hour that you will need to attend. This will be your first assignment, your first campaign that we need you to work on. I think you will be very happy here.”
“Thanks, Jackie,” I said. Jackie Desmond was my new boss. She was the CEO of Myers Ink and Paper, a medium sized company that produced ink and paper. It was apparently a shrinking market with everything going digital nowadays, but they were fighting to hang on tooth and nail. They wanted someone with new marketing ideas to help them out of a slump. They actually preferred someone without experience, which was how I got the job. I went into the interview thinking there was no way. I was approaching thirty, I was pregnant, and I had no experience in a fast changing marketplace, but there was something they saw in me. I was offered the job nearly on the spot.
It had been three weeks since I moved out of my apartment and left Chicago. I’d decided to settle in Columbus, Ohio. It was a nice, big city with a lot of opportunity, and I figured it would be easy enough for me to hide away from things there. It was a good place to start fresh.
Once I hit the road, I found it was easier than I thought it would be to just keep going. I had a vague notion of where I wanted to end up, but I wasn’t sure until I saw the sprawling buildings of Columbus looming ahead of me. I decided that would be a good place for me to stop. Luckily, I had a friend there named Lucy Shane. I’d actually known her back in college and we’d been roommates there for a bit. And now it appeared that we would be roommates once again. I reached out to her and she agreed.
As I drove towards Columbus though, I must have almost turned the car around about fifty times. I was really wondering what I was thinking. I was starting to question my sanity. I could only imagine the hell that Gary was going through right now. What was he doing? How was he reacting? I wished him all the best in the world, and it was my hope that deep down he would eventually forgive me, and there might have been a chance for us down the line somewhere, when our lives were less complicated.
But then again, maybe I was making the wrong choice. I kept thinking this in the back of my mind, until I realized that there was no right and wrong choice to make here. They were both hard choices with dire consequences. If I stayed, I ruined Gary’s life; if I left, then I broke his heart. I had chosen the option I thought would be the least devastating.
And I was broken, too. I wasn’t sleeping well. I was not eating enough, despite the constant hunger I was undergoing. I felt about half sick to my stomach most of the time, but I was told the morning sickness would eventually fade. And the waves of depression washing over me were frightening. There were times when I struggled just to get out of bed. What was it all for? I was alone. I’d destroyed the most important thing in my life. And now I was broken.
I got settled into my office, arranged things to my liking, tried my computer log in, and got ready for the meeting. When I arrived in the large conference room, I was surprised to see that there were only five other people there. I thought the meeting would be much bigger. I was quickly introduced to some of the other members of my team. They all seemed nice enough, but most of them eyed me suspiciously. It gave me the impression that they didn’t want another new person with possibly great ideas who might steal some thunder. I had done nothing yet to prove I was a threat, but I was already being treated that way. I wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or a bad thing.
The meeting was slow and boring and I did my best to pay attention to the new campaign we were supposed to push and sell. My job was to come up with as many creative ads that might work well for television spots, as well as online advertisements, and print media. They wanted the first of the ads done by the end of the week. It was going to be a lot of work, quite a bit of brainstorming, but I was confident that I could handle the job. I was ready for the challenge.
Besides, I wanted to make my child proud of me. It was going to be us against the world for a while. I was going to suck it up and do this job I was sure to hate until after the baby arrived, and then I would simply try to find work back at a fire station. But I had to admit, the money I was going to make in advertising was way better. That was attractive, but I always swore to myself I’d never do a job just for the money. But that was when I only had myself to support. With a child on the way, I wanted to provide the best possible life I could. But did that mean I needed to be miserable and bored out of my mind to do it? I didn’t think so.
I was going to work hard to make as much money as I could until I could land on my feet properly, and then I would have a nice little cushion for me and the baby when that time came.
After the meeting, I was headed back to my office to get to work when a woman about my age approached me. She was tall, slender, very attractive, and she had the kind of smile that would light up any room. I could already see several of the men walking past leering at her in a not so obvious way unless you had a trained eye. She seemed to possess the kind of confidence that anyone would dream of having. And for whatever reasons she had zoned in on me.
