Gathering Dark, Candice Fox [inspirational books for students .TXT] 📗

mistake, an accident, something that was not meant to be. Sometimes I wonder if I’m a black hole. A vacuum in space. I’m the plus-one, on the waiting list for my shot at belonging in the world. Maybe that’s why I never feel satisfied or settled.

If I wasn’t meant to be here, then a weird twist of fate happened when I was born, you know what I mean? A rule was broken. And so why in the hell do I spend so much time and effort and heartache trying to be something or someone when I’m no one and nothing? I don’t feel like I count. Don’t get me wrong—I had great foster parents. They had a child who died so they kind of felt like they’d replace their minus-one with a plus-one: me, the figure outside the equation. The extra. Once I got past childhood I think they kind of forgot that there was supposed to be other stuff. Adult to adult parent–child relationships. Sometimes I don’t hear from them for nine months, maybe longer. It’s like I served my purpose for them and now they’re just bored.

I don’t think that translates into an excuse for panicking during a bank heist and killing a bunch of people. But for me maybe it translates into an interest in the same kind of “break free” mentality. Separation from the real world, from everyone else. Sometimes I wonder what would happen if I just took off. Packed a backpack and just went away. Anywhere. Nowhere. I could leave behind everything that is Dayly Lawlor and find a space in life where I’m not the outlying piece of the jigsaw puzzle. I could find or build a whole new puzzle where I fit.

But all that requires stuff I haven’t got. Courage. Worldliness. Money. A car. A fucking backpack, ha ha. I think I would want to understand where I came from properly before I went. All of the different pieces and elements. Because for me there’d be no coming back.

Sorry, all of that got really heavy, when I said at the outset that I wouldn’t let it. I suppose I’ll just send this letter anyway and see what you think.

Chat soon,

Dayly

P.S. Sounds in your last letter like you’re trying to hook me into the whole mystery about there being more money out there somewhere, but I’m not buying it. Yes, I’ve looked at all the articles and conspiracy theories online. Been to all the subreddits about it. Plenty of experts agree, there is more money missing from the robberies that were attributed to you than was ever found or spent. But I also know how many marriage proposals guys on death row get. Surely you’ve found someone to give the money to, over the years, if there ever was any.

JESSICA

The Blue Room was close to home, only a stroll down Alameda from her small apartment. For Jessica, it held comforting memories. She’d sat here alone every year for five Super Bowls, most of the patrons wedged into the huge round booths upholstered in bright, plasticky teal, while she watched from the bar as they leaped from their seats or paced the sticky floor, grabbing their heads as teams scored or fumbled. The blue lights above the bar reminded her of the brick public toilets on Santa Monica beach with their anti-injection bulbs, her early days on the job hustling hobos off the sand or chasing bag-snatchers along the windy esplanade. She lingered now over a second Manhattan with two cherries, the bartender having forgone the fancy glass and given her a napkin to tear to shreds, the way he had a thousand times before.

She needed a distraction from what she had learned about the Blair Harbour case from Digbert. The cheese sandwich bite, the pathologist had asserted, was distinctly male. Jessica couldn’t think about that now, what that meant about her, her work, the boy behind the vine-covered gate. She retreated from one growing storm in her mind into the chaos of another.

It’s decision time, she thought. The words that rattled in her mind were in Captain Whitton’s heavy tones. Though she’d never liked being forced into a corner to decide on anything, she needed to make a call. Rachel had wanted to read the letter Stan left in his will, written on his deathbed in the company of his lawyer, over the phone for Jessica on the morning she broke the news about the house. But she couldn’t have that man’s voice in her mind, not then, not when it had taken so long to scrub his daughter’s crime scene photographs from her memory.

Now, she could no longer ignore the letter. She opened the photos app on her phone. Rachel had sent a picture of the handwritten letter, wanting to keep one of the last things her brother had created before he slipped quietly from the world. She scrolled to the picture and zoomed in.

Dear Jessica,

I am writing to you to inform you of my decision to bequeath my house in Brentwood to you. The finer details of the arrangement will be presented to you by the executor of my will, Rachel, who you know, and my lawyer, Martin Astley of Astley, Rich and Pine.

In the years after Bernie’s killer took her away from me, all I had been able to do was measure and endure the ways in which I could not act. Bernadette was only there at the Ralphs supermarket in the first instance because I’d forgotten some ingredients for dinner and had her stop there on the way home from work. It was my fault that she was available to him in the parking lot. I was unable to find her the night she went missing, or in the days after. I was unable to save her from her fate. I was unable to exact my revenge on the man who did this. I will never be able to hold her again and tell her she is