Page 18 of Promise of Destruction
I sit up, brushing my hair off my face. The sky is lightening into the fusion of cotton candy colors that makes me sick, and it’s close enough to morning.
I muster the courage to walk to the bathroom, turning every light on in my path, electric bill be damned, and force myself to look at the window. The first rays of the sun’s light are startingto slip between the slats, brightening the room, and it gives me enough peace to get closer.
But of course, there’s no one there.
Maybe there never was at all.
I don’thearher words—covering my ears with my hands won’t keep her from terrorizing me—but if I did, I think she’d say everything in a sing-song voice, taunting me with her silky peppiness as much as she does with the words she chooses so deliberately.
No.
He was there, standing outside my window.
He watched me. He came on my wall.
Or maybe you imagined the whole thing…
I might consider that possibility if it weren’t for the fact that I’m not the only witness. Tony saw it.
Typically, I have no qualms about walking through my own house naked, but after last night’s events—real or imagined—I’m not feeling so bold, so I turn the water on and wrap a towel around myself while I go set a pot of coffee and down one of the little yellow pills that’s supposed to shut up the bitch in my head.
By the time I’m stepping out of the shower, I realize I fucked up and lost track of time. I’m going to be late, and I still have to stop for coffee because the minute I open the fridge I remember I didn’t order any creamer. I do my best to doctor it up, mixing in heavy cream that’s a few days out of date and some caramel syrup that has been crusted over in disuse, but allthataccomplishes is making me later… and creating a pretty swirl as it flows into the drain because it’s foul.
If there’s one thing I’m grateful for this past year, beyond Marissa and Khan and Tony, without whom I’d certainly have already killed myself with every measure of finality, it’s Aaron. Not only does he look the other way when I’m habitually late, he still hasn’t called to give me hell about slipping the hit piece inwith yesterday’s running’s, which means he is either so mad he will ream me out in person, or he doesn’t care that I went behind his back and jeopardized his job. That’s why the least I can do is pick up his coffee—black with a side of sugar and cream—and try not to let it cover my car interior as I pull too quickly into the parking garage and stop short when I see a shiny, expensive looking car in the spot where I usually park.
Aaron offered me his parking spot when I first started. They weren’t assigned, but he’d been there long enough that nobody tried to take it if he wasn’t the first one there in the morning. When he noticed that I was consistently staying late despite his insistence that I not overwork myself, he’d told me I at least had to park closer to the elevator, and subsequently, the camera.It’s safer,he’d insisted when he gave me the space.
Though I was embarrassed to accept his offer at first, I’m grateful for it every night that I walk alone to my car through the empty garage. Moving on when my husband’s murderer is still out there, when they could come back to finish me off, sets me on edge. I always feel like someone is watching me these days.
The car that stole my parking spot looks too fancy to belong to Aaron, unless he got a hefty raise, so I come to the conclusion that we must have company from the upper echelons of the media industry. The possibility is already annoying in and of itself, but when you add in the fact I have to walk six rows up in heels, balancing Aaron’s coffee atop my own, I’m irritable.
I’m so preoccupied with making sure I don’t trip and splash coffee all over or worse, drop my computer out from under my arm, that I don’t realize something is off until I push the door open with my shoulder and stop at Emily’s desk to readjust and say good morning. But when I look up from behind the paper cup of coffee, it’s not Emily standing there.
With her hair in a sleek, shiny blonde ponytail that doesn’t allow even a single hair to be out of place, the woman standingthere looks like she’s been plucked off the front page of a high fashion magazine, complete with a bone structure that simply screams:Why yes, I know I’m a fabulous bitch.Her ice cold eyes don’t help matters, either.
“Oh,” I swallow my surprise. Her gaze on me is unsettling, and it takes me a moment to recover, tucking my hair behind my ear so that I can get an unobstructed view of her. “Are you filling in for Emily? Is she sick?”
“I’m notfilling in.” The bitch snaps, and her accent is decidedly too posh to be from anywhere around here. I’d say she’s somewhere from the East Coast, based on that accent alone. “This is my desk now. Move along.”
I wait a second to see if she’s joking, but when her face stays every bit as stoic, I tuck my laptop deeper into the crook of my arm and balance the coffees again until I reach my desk.
But when I set my coffee down, I notice that everything is gone. All of my personal belongings have disappeared, and in their place are somebody else’s possessions. A framed picture of a happy couple, a smaller one of a black lab, a bobble head of some popular TV show figurine.
Maybe you don’t work here. Maybe you never worked here at all.
No.
The pill was supposed to put her to sleep. Why is this bitch in my head right now when I’m trying to act like I have my life together?
What the fuck is going on?
Tears threaten to fall as my face turns hot, and the woman from the framed photo approaches me with an equal mixture of concern and irritation that’s honestly pretty impressive. I spin around, looking for anything familiar, an anchor that will assure me I amnotinsane, that Iamin control.
But when my eyes fall on the door, I realize the white letters that spelled outThe Covington Tribune, complete with the lopsided e at the end, have been replaced by a fancy etching in the glass.
I don’t even notice all the eyes on me as I cross the room, back the way I came, and open the door so that I can run my hand over the letters that have been etched into the glass there. I just left this office hours ago, and I’d shaken my head for the umpteenth time about the fact that nobody cared to re-order the stencil and fix the skewed letters. But now the name that’s been etched into the door with precision looks like it’s been there the whole time.
The Covington Herald
