Save Her, Abigail Osborne [ebook reader for surface pro txt] 📗

freaked out. She was on edge all the time, as if waiting for Cecelia’s next move. Flora had not voiced this to Sam. There was no point. He would not entertain the idea that his mother was behind any of this. But didn’t he see that she was the only one who would want to drive a wedge between them; that his mother was the only one evil enough to try and torment her?

Taking a deep breath, Flora tried to regain some of her determination from last night. I will not let Cecelia win, she thought, repeating this over and over like a mantra whilst she set to cleaning up.

Clearing up the mess left from the class was one of her favourite parts of the job. It gave her a chance to spend time looking at the creations of the children. Today, Andre had created a picture of his dog using different coloured materials. At the moment, Andre was non-verbal, and his parents weren’t even sure how much he could understand. She could not wait to show his mother, Sandra, this picture when it was finished. Across the top, he had written ‘Max’ in large spidery writing. His first word. Swiping the tears from her eyes she continued around the room, collecting up the work and moving them carefully to the storage cupboards that lined one of the walls. Each class had a cupboard where she could store their projects until the following week.

Giving the room a last once-over, she checked for anything she could have missed. Something twinkled on the floor under one of the tables. Climbing under the table, she reached out and found it was a silver chain. She held it up to the light. Recognition stole her breath away. She stared at the silver necklace, stunned. Hanging from the silver chain was a heart-shaped pendant. It was just possible to see the ‘R’ engraved on the front of the heart. The ‘R’ stood for Rebecca. Her mother. With trembling hands, she lowered the heart onto the palm of her hand, gently caressing the ‘R’. She did not know how long she sat on the floor. Tears welled from deep inside and coursed down her face.

During her bouts of insomnia, caused by the anxiety she had been through in the last week, she would stare at her parents’ faces on Sam’s canvas, trying to focus on them instead of her turbulent emotions. On the canvas, it was possible to see every detail of her mother’s necklace. It was an exact match for the one she was holding in her hand. The only reason she knew it wasn’t her mother’s was that this one was newer and shinier, whereas her mother’s had been tarnished with scratches as she had worn it every day without fail.

Flora remembered asking the social worker who came to see her shortly after her parents’ death where her mum’s necklace was, as she would have been wearing it in the accident. She never took it off. Eventually, the harassed social worker had looked into it. ‘I’m sorry, dear, it seems it got destroyed along with everything else when your parents’ car caught fire after the accident.’

It was only then that Flora turned the necklace around. On the back, a word had been crudely scratched into the silver surface. ‘Flora’.

31

The weather was awful. October was no longer her favourite month anymore, Sophie decided as she opened her door and was instantly slapped in the face with droplets of cold rain. It had been relentless all day and it made her mood plummet. The wind and rain battered her fiercely as she crossed the car park and entered the garden centre. It was only Flora she loved enough to leave the house for in this torrential weather.

Sophie preferred to eat in more sophisticated establishments, but Flora would insist on living off her meagre wage from the centre which meant she could not afford to dine anywhere expensive. A meal at Sophie and Greg’s favourite restaurant would probably amount to the same as Flora earned in a month. She could not understand why Flora would not want to treat herself every once in a while. Did she not remember all the times they would share a 99p cone of chips from the local chippy because that was the only place they could to afford to eat? To be fair, those chips had tasted like luxury compared to their staple diet of pasta and rice. Still, the breakfast was quite nice here so she would tolerate it. There wasn’t anything she wouldn’t do for Flora.

Sophie spotted Flora sitting at one of the tables in the café. Once again, Flora was holding the necklace in her hands, absent-mindedly rubbing at it with her fingers. She was still wearing the same cream jumper and blue jeans she’d had on last night, albeit more creased. Her face was gaunt, her cheekbones seemed more prominent than usual. When she looked up at Sophie, her thin smile no longer met her eyes, which were dull and expressionless. Her pale skin made the dark circles under her eyes all the more pronounced and her eyelids were swollen and puffy. She looked more like the Flora Sophie had known as a child, the one still reeling from her parents’ death. But it was completely understandable: seeing a locket that looked exactly like your late mother’s would disturb even the strongest of people.

Yesterday she had received a gibberish voicemail from a distraught Flora. Sophie had raced straight over to find her in the kitchen drinking a glass of red wine. The bottle was already half empty and she spied another one in the recycling. A necklace was on the table and Flora explained that it was just like the one her mother used to wear. Her voice was robotic, like she was devoid of emotion. After finishing the whole bottle of wine, Flora had cried herself to sleep in Sophie’s arms, the grief of losing