“Are you alright?”, her boss asked, but his voice sounded like it was far away. “I need… a moment”, Cal ground out, forcing her legs to move, even though they protested, and stumbled away from the crime scene. She saw concerned looks thrown her way, but she didn’t care.
“Don’t fall apart”, she told herself, as she picked up her pace until she was running. She didn’t know where she was running to, she only knew that she needed to get away. Away from all of those people who pitied her, who knew what this meant to Cal, who remembered what had happened ten years ago, remembered what Cal had tried so hard to forget.
Ten years ago, she had seen the exact same M.O. before, down to the style of the dress. Only it had been her twin sister, lying on the ground, unmoving, with all of the life gone from her body. It had been Cal’s first year as a police officer then, and the image of her sister’s lifeless form had seared itself into her brain, even following Cal into her dreams.
For two years, Cal had thought about nothing else than to find that monster who had murdered her sister, but there was nothing. No evidence to be found, no eye witnesses, nothing that pointed to the killer. After Cal had ended up in the hospital twice because she barely ate and slept, she made the hardest decision in her life. She stopped. She forced herself to give up this madness and accept the fact that her twin was dead and she might never find out who did this.
That’s when the partying and drinking and pushing people away began. Even though Cal pretended to have moved on, she hadn’t really. She was just repressing everything about that time, muddling her brain with alcohol until she no longer knew left from right.
But now, as memories and emotions long buried started to rise up inside of Cal, she didn’t know what to do. So she dropped to her knees on the muddy ground and screamed. She screamed for the sister she had lost, she screamed because she had lost herself trying to get justice, she screamed out of anger at the person who had brutally murdered her twin, and she screamed because he was now back and Cal was afraid that when she went after him again, this time she would lose herself to a point where she could never find herself again.
© Sarah Wazlawik 2022-08-29