Page 1 of Second Chance Fate

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Rebecca Taylor was convincedthe music played while on hold for healthcare services was DJ’d by the devil himself. She was sure Muzak’s Bluetooth connection was straight from hell. Whoever oversaw programming needed to be fired. Common sense would tell you its aim was to reduce anxiety and foster a sense of calm, but it had the polar opposite effect on Taylor. Whenever the docile, repetitive tones hit her eardrums, her blood pressure spiked.

The music stopped, and she took a breath as she started to speak, “Hi, I’m—" The robotic voice cut her off, sending her heart plummeting.

“We are experiencing a high volume of calls at the moment, and all of our customer service representatives are currently assisting other customers. Your wait time is now forty-five to sixty minutes.”

“What the f…fork?” Taylor caught herself before dropping the f-bomb and pivoted toThe Good Place'scursing system. Her eleven-year-old was in the hearing equivalent of the splash zone in SeaWorld, watching television and eating his cereal. He mightnot have been paying attention to her, but he was definitely in earshot, and he did not miss anything.

Also, today wasn’t just any day. She planned on attending church for the first time in over a decade in just a couple of hours. Was she perfect? Absolutely not, but being on her best behavior couldn’t hurt.

“Thank you for your continued patience,” the voice said, in what sounded like a very condescending tone, before the music began again.

How could the wait time be forty-five to sixty minutes?! When she originally called fifteen minutes ago, the wait time was ten to twenty-five minutes; now it had basically doubled.

Frustration consumed her. Weekends always made things more difficult, so of course, that was when emergencies would happen and medication would run out. She could live to a thousand and still never understand why the medical community acted as if diseases and chronic illnesses cared about regular business hours. Her son Owen’s type 1 diabetes, asthma, epilepsy, and heart condition didn’t take weekends off. They weren’t Monday-through-Friday, nine-to-five conditions.

If she added up all the hours that she’d spent on hold, listening to the purgatory mixtape, waiting to speak to a medical assistant, nurse practitioner, doctor, pharmacist, insurance provider, claim agent, or hospital admin, she would guess it had sucked a year, if not years—plural—from her life. Being on hold was to her what The Machine in the Pit of Despair was to Wesley inThe Princess Bride.

Having no other choice but to accept the fact that she was going to spend the next forty-five to sixty minutes on hold, she decided to be as productive as possible. After pouring herself a cup of coffee, she opened her email and crossed her fingers, toes, arms, legs, eyes, and hair, metaphorically, that she’d heard back from any of the jobs she’d applied for. It looked promisingat first. Her inbox was full. Unfortunately, a cursory glance revealed it was filled with spam.

After filtering out the junk, she was left with a half dozen responses, none of which were any use to her because none of them had the one requirement that was non-negotiable: that she could work from home or during school hours only.

She’d cast a wide net, signed up for every job recruiter site, and applied for nearly five hundred work-from-home positions. The problem was, she hadn’t had a job her entire adult life. Her freshman year of college, she got pregnant during her one and only walk-on-the-wild-side one-night stand on spring break in Daytona Beach. Well, technically it was a one-and-a-half-night stand, but that was semantics because when she peed on the stick ten weeks later, she had no idea how to get ahold of him. Whether it had been twenty-four or thirty-six hours, she didn’t remember his last name, or if she’d ever even asked what his last name was.

She was young, alone, and scared but determined to figure it out. She’d aged out of the foster care system six months before peeing on the stick and had no family or support system to speak of. The only information she had about her birth parents was that they both had addiction problems. She was declared a ward of the state when she was three months old. She’d never known a single person who shared her DNA, which was a very isolating, lonely existence. Getting pregnant was an accident, but it was the greatest gift. Her plan had been to raise the baby by herself…unfortunately, that didn’t happen.

A ding sounded on her phone, and a message bubble appeared on her computer screen. It was a Google Alert she’d set up. Her ex’s trial for attempted murder was in a few weeks, and his defense team was claiming to have new evidence that would prove his innocence and exonerate him.

Taylor instantly felt sick to her stomach. It wasn’t that she thought he could prove his innocence; everyone knew he was guilty. What scared her was that he could be exonerated. Unlike her, Martin Watts had a large family and support system. His father was a circuit court judge. His older brother worked in the district attorney’s office, and his younger brother worked in SWAT. He had several cousins in the DEA and three uncles in the sheriff’s office.

He had connections. Those connections were part of the reason it took five years for Taylor to leave him. It was why she’d had to go two thousand miles away. It was why she used her last name now, instead of her first, just to be safe. It was why she didn’t let Owen have social media, and it was one of the reasons it took her so long to enroll Owen in school, because she couldn’t go through the traditional channels to obtain his medical records.

“What’s wrong?”

She glanced over at her son, who had been glued to the television moments before, his face now etched with the worry of a forty-year-old, not an eleven-year-old.

Taylor sighed, trying to play off whatever he was picking up on as irritation and not fear. “I’m going to be on hold for another forty-five minutes.”

He continued staring at her. She loved Owen and would never want to change a single thing about him, but raising a gifted child with a genius IQ who was also intuitive and constantly described as having an ‘old soul’ was exhausting. She’d heard parents talking about how clueless their kids were, how they never noticed things about them; that hadneverbeen her experience. Nothing got past Owen. Which made keeping the true reason they’d moved to Hope Falls a secret from him damn near impossible.

“It’s just stuff with the case,” she admitted, knowing if she didn’t, he’d be even more worried than if she told him the truth.

He considered her response, then looked down at the floor with a sigh. When he looked back up at her, he was wearing a grin that caused the dimple on his right cheek to be pronounced as he shrugged. “Well…it’ll be fine…”

“Or it won’t,” Taylor finished the inside joke as her own smile spread across her face.

When Owen was eight, he had to get his first arterial blood gases test, and before he did, he asked the respiratory therapist if it would hurt or not. The guy looked at him with a blank expression in the most monotone voice and said, “Well...it’ll hurt…or it won’t.”

Spoiler alert: it hurt. The test was awful, but when the guy left, Owen and Taylor looked at each other and started laughing. Since that day, they must have used that phrase over a hundred times, and it still never got old to them. They’d really gotten a lot of mileage out of it.

Two more articles popped up on Taylor’s computer, pulling her attention back to it. One was an interview Martin’s older brother had given, and the other was from his dad. As she read each one, her stomach went from feeling a little queasy to feeling like she’d downed a liter of expired milk and then hopped on a roller coaster in a hundred-and-ten-degree heat.

She wished so badly she could hop in Bill & Ted’s phone booth or Marty McFly’s DeLorean and go back and tell her eighteen-year-old self to stick to her plan and raise the baby herself; unfortunately, that’s not how life worked.

She met Martin Watts when she was five months pregnant and moved into his house almost immediately. He was ten years older than her and in law enforcement. She felt safe with him. She had no one, no idea what she was doing, and no safety net. The idea of being a police officer’s wife and bringing her babyinto the world in a stable relationship and home life sounded like she was handed the golden ticket to the Chocolate Factory.

At the time, Taylor didn’t see her ex’s behavior as toxic. She was naïve and, despite her upbringing, always saw the good in people. She wasn’t familiar with emotional manipulation tactics like gaslighting, love-bombing, invalidation, coercion, blame-shifting, or triangulation, all of which he was a master of. She didn’t know the red flags of financial control, isolation, restricted communication, overprotection, and jealousy.

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