Page 128 of Severed Rivalry
Me: Morning, Angel. Almost down the mountain. I’ll call when I’m in the car. Sounds like a great morning, except the waking up alone part.
I get a thumbs up quickly and I exhale. We’re going to be okay.
36
ocean of never-ending torment
Sariah
The job search is way more complicated than I expected. It’s nerve wracking and messes with my self-confidence. How is it that I can’t manage to get past any of the bots at any company? Keywords are there. Experience in spades. Where the company is looking for something reasonable, I’ve applied. I’ve barely even gotten the perfunctory email thanking me for my application.
I finally switched over to real estate in areas known to have amazing schools. I never once considered moving, though, because a shell of a house, straight down to studs in any of these areas, was out of my budget. Walls and, gasp, bathrooms or a kitchen… those would’ve had me being laughed out of the bank.
My little house has met all our needs. Two bedrooms, one bath, small footprint on a large lot in a good school district. It allowed me to raise Renée on one salary in a safe neighborhood and put food on the table. Neighborhood kids met at the park to play and run and rode their bikes. It has good bones, was built to last, and has charm.
Searching real estate sites, even as successful as I’ve become, at these prices is humbling. Between the notion that I can’t find work and the idea that I can’t afford better even now, I’m a little glum.
It’s also the day. Renée’s birthday always does this to me,though I never let her see it. So does the anniversary of the day she was conceived.
She is perfect. She is loved. She is wanted and she’s needed.
Some days like today, though I’ll never let it show, she reminds me of what was lost in gaining her.
I drop the lid on my computer and leave my phone with it on the island as I grab a bottle from Cian’s liquor cabinet and make myself a stout drink. Bailing onto the loveseat on the terrace, I contemplate the brutality that brought me beauty, the terror that brought me the treasure that is my daughter.
My innocence was traded for hers.
My future was traded so she might have one.
My sacrifice was traded so that she would never need to have the same.
“Sariah?” My name spoken in sheer panic rouses me. “Angel?”
I lift myself from where I slouch and peer over the arm of the lounger to find Cian heading back into the house.
“Ci,” I call, trying to catch his attention. “I’m right here.”
He rushes back to me. He’s better than I deserve, and everything about this last month proves it.
“Angel? Did you fall asleep? At ten in the morning?”
I lift the empty tumbler and shake it in my hand. Nothing says loser like day drinking and passing out after breakfast.
He takes a seat at my feet, lifting to place them on his lap. He stares at my glass and back to me. “Want to tell me about it?”
“I get melancholy a couple of days a year. I don’t let Née see it because I don’t want her to think it’s about her. It’s not. It’s about me.” I drop my eyes closed as he begins massaging the soles of my feet.
Fighting back the prickle of tears and the stinging in my nose that always accompanies it, I take several deep breaths. “Somehow, this feels like fourteen times, or one hundred times, the sadness and overwhelm. It’s all I lost—allwelost—plus the threat offourteen. Can I survive a year of this worry? And will it even stop in a year? Have things changed to make it two years or three?”
“Angel.”
“Am I even making sense? And did I lead them right to us? Fucking Liam telling me I’d let other kids drown to save my own. All I did was dangle her above an ocean of never-ending torment.”
The job search, the fact that I might have made myself unhireable with my actions, the house search with prices that aren’t remotely reasonable… all have compounded my despondency until I want to crawl into a hole.
“And the vodka is numbing your fears?” His words are cautious and quiet.
“Nope.”
