AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Alright, let’s go outside,” Mom said, grabbing my arm. I swatted her away and took a step to the right of her. I could feel everyone’s eyes in the room turn to us. Maybe in the past, I would have cared. Would have felt that pinching embarrassment that people were focusing on me. That I would come off as the crazy person.
But I didn’t care anymore.
I didn’t care.
I didn’t care.
“I don’t care,” I said loudly as most of the voices in the room hushed down. “I don’t care at all how this makes you look, Mom. I don’t care how this makesmelook. Why? Because I know there are things beyond any of this.” I gestured my arms in the air in front of me, emphasizing my point. “I’m so sick of being forced to do things so that it makes my mother look good. So sick of pretending to be okay with things. I’m not okay. My dad killed himself, and I was the one to walk in on him, and then my mother never even talked to me about it. So, fuck. Maybe I’ll never fully recover. But there are some things I know for sure.”
I gazed around, seeing I had an entire room of spectators, all watching me speak now. I had an audience. Especially Doug whose eyes focused on me with anticipation. As if perhaps I was about to say the things that no one in his family had ever dared to say.
The floor was mine.
“When I said I didn’t care, that’s not completely true. I do care. I care tremendously,” I said. “But not about the pleasantries or the stupid, insignificant things… I care about the important things.”
I cared about Jamie. I cared about Holly. I cared about finishing my books and writing more for other people to see. Writing my books the way I wanted to write them. Not keeping the dad alive because my agent saw the book as being better that way.
I cared about someday being okay, about someday having my shit together, about somehow healing through my past trauma so that I could move forward and someday make it back to the man I always loved.
So, yes, I cared.
But I couldn’t give two fucking shits about anyone at this party. Especially the people who had wronged Jamie—or let the bad things happen—and could say nothing except how they thought it was his fault for taking his own life.
“Jamie is a beautiful soul,” I said. “He’s the reason why I’m still here, if you must know. The only reason I stayed. He’s always with me, even if I can’t hear him. Even if I don’t get to talk to him for a very long time. But he stays with me in my heart. And I promised him I would try to be okay. Jamie did not take his life because he wanted to. It’snothis fault.”
I let out a breath. “News flash, people. Suicide is a mental health issue. Aside from pulling the trigger, or setting up the rope, or driving to a cliff so that you can drive off… you really have no choice in the matter. You don’t control all the events leading up to that moment when nothing else in the world seems live-able anymore. You don’t control all the trauma that sits inside your soul, begging you to take that necessary step so that you no longer have to feel the pain that haunts you every single moment you continue to breathe.”
Mom’s arms crossed as she stared at me through beady eyes. “Alright, Jemma. That’s enough now. Time for us to go, okay?” She stepped closer to me, pinching my arm this time.
“No, Mom. I’m almost done. Then I’ll leave… so you can get back to doing your thing. See, this is how I view it. You’re my mom, I have to accept who you are, and the things you do, and the way you act in front of people. But what I know now that I didn’t fully understand until this moment… is that I don’t have to follow your rules. And you’re just going to have to accept that I live my life differently than you do. That we’re two different people… but that doesn’t make my feelings and my way of doings things any less valid.”
With that, I took my invisible bow—the one I imagined myself doing inside my own damn head—and nodded toward the people still watching this scene. The one I’d caused. The one I’d caused and didn’t give two shits over.
“Thank you all for having me, anyway,” I said. “But… I have other things to do.”
Like a book to finish.
The one that would have a completely different ending than I had before. Except, my own ending, the way I wanted to write it.
Oh, the dad was still going to die alright.
But there may have been another way to handle it other than what I’d previously thought of.
See, if it had been anything I’d learned over the last couple of weeks, it was that sometimes you had to die in order to goddamn fucking live.
And me? I was fucking living.
Chapter Sixty
Discovery
I slammed on the pedal as my Rogue raced through the streets, joy at the distance between me and that damn party. My tires glided against the asphalt, the sound of rain water spraying back up into the wheel well. Glomps of rainwater crashed against the windshield, making it damn near impossible to see as I carried on, rushing to get back to my house.
The ending of my book rested on the very tip of my tongue, waiting for me to get back home and finish writing. To the desk space I’d started to set up all thanks to Jamie.
He’d said he had an idea for how the book ended. An alternative that might make me and my agent happy. He wasn’t around to tell me what that was, but something told me he’d agree with my new plan.
The dad was going to die. But another character—an ex-boyfriend who had passed away—was going to come back into the picture as a sort of spirit guide. Fiction pulled from real life, am I right? And this spirit character would pop in near the very end to tell my main character that her father was okay. That we all lived forever. That no one ever died.
