Total pages in book: 88
Estimated words: 80342 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 402(@200wpm)___ 321(@250wpm)___ 268(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 80342 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 402(@200wpm)___ 321(@250wpm)___ 268(@300wpm)
“I remember everything.” He gritted the words out through his teeth. I felt cold then hot, and my body started to shake. I looked everywhere but at him, as I waited to see what he would do next. “Let’s go, you and I are gonna talk.” He practically dragged me from my house with mom in the kitchen humming.
Derrick
As the days went by and there was still no word from or about Lauren, I'd vacillated between never wanting to see her again, and wanting to know what happened to her, why the sudden change? And why the hell she’d tried to kill the girls and me.
It was hard, but I did it, I found a balance between fatherhood and taking care of business. Mrs. Cummings was really coming through, and when she couldn’t, mom was there. Ever since they came back from their last trip, she and dad have been sticking to me, and the girls.
I tried talking them out of it, but like she said, somewhere in the Caribbean sea, they realized that we were the only real family they had left, and they decided that it was best, especially for their grandbabies' first year to be here. I didn’t argue, but I tried my best not to impose.
I had to take a long hard look at myself, at the way I’d been living. I realized since the day my friends and I got drunk and stupidly got into the car with a wasted driver who ran someone off the road and crashed into a tree that I’ve been walking on eggshells.
I’ve been so afraid of screwing up that I’d made a mess of things. For one, I now realized that maybe I got married too young. I did that shit because in the society I lived in, that’s just what you did after graduating and getting a decent job.
My other mistake was in taking everything Lauren had told me at face value, that shit almost cost me the lives of my precious children, who are the only things I didn’t regret since my eighteenth birthday when my world changed.
As I sat in my darkened living room one evening with a glass of cognac for courage, I took it all out and looked at it, looked at the fear that I had let rule me for too long. I fucked up as a teenager, yeah, but that didn’t mean I had to live the rest of my life with guilt.
I wasn’t the one driving, but I was there, I knew better, and someone lost their life because I didn’t do the right thing. I realized as I sat there that I’d never really dealt with the guilt I was feeling then either. Instead, I’d shut off, just shut down.
It was that thought that led my mind to her, to Jenny. As more and more memories of what she was like as a kid came flooding in, I started to wonder what it was that had made her change. What tragedy in her young life had turned her into a shell of the person she used to be?
From there, it was like a spiraling whirlwind; my mind went from one thing to the next until it ended up on that day, the day of the incident. I hadn’t looked at the recordings from that weekend; I just downloaded them to my phone and Mac for later. But each time I told myself to watch, I kept putting it off.
Now that I was doing some soul searching and some house cleaning, so to speak, I decided that it was high time I manned the fuck up and watch. The wound was no longer raw, and I was already at a place in my head where I knew that if Lauren walked through that door right now, all she could do for me is sign the papers I’d already had drawn up to end our union.
I’ve dealt with the guilt of what I could’ve possibly done to turn her into what she became and refuse to let it eat away at me anymore. When I look back on our life together, I’d done everything I could to make her happy.
Even when she stopped taking the pill and got pregnant without telling me I didn’t blow up at her, I just took it all in stride. And by the time the twins came, I was glad she’d done that shit; otherwise, I wouldn’t have those two amazing human beings in my life.
It was for them as much as myself that I got up from the chair and headed upstairs to my home office to finally do what I should’ve done weeks ago. I had the video rewound to the beginning of that day. The good thing about these cameras is that they only activate when there’s motion.