Chapter Thirty-Three
Elyse
Ireally shouldn’t have taken the day off.
I don’t know why I thought pottering around the house made anything better.
It just made me think about Molly more. It turned my mind into an absolute whirlpool of thoughts, the worst possible situations that she could have found herself in.
And worse Johnathan’s words repeated in my head every single time that I found myself in a deep rabbit hole of negativity.
She’s going to be fine; she will be back in a couple of days I am sure that there is nothing to worry about.
But he really did have no idea what this feeling was like.
I knew that I was horribly harsh on her.
I knew that she had never done anything terribly wrong or end up in too much trouble.
She was a grown adult now and she made her own decisions.
Even if she did end up in a less desirable situation, it wasn’t for me to judge and it wasn’t on me to be the one to pick up the pieces.
But I had felt this way about Molly all of my life.
Even before our parents died. I felt this way from the moment that she was born.
I remember the very day that Mom bought her home in her tiny capsule.
I remember seeing her small innocent face and I remember the same familiar feeling in my chest that all these years later, I still felt now. I had to protect her from this world.
I don’t know why I felt the same feeling then that I do now, there was just something about her, something that she had that I never did.
Even before everything went so horribly wrong for the both of us.
It was her innocence. It was like I was born into this world already aware of its cruel ways, and she…
she was completely blind to it. Sometimes when I thought about my sister now, I envied that part of her.
But the envy faded very quickly when I remembered that it was me that really wanted to nurture it.
To make sure that she kept that spark in her, even after everything that she had done.
I wanted her to keep it, and maybe the fact that I wanted her life to be so innocent and live her life so carefree was because I wanted her to keep the very light that I never got to have, the very thing that I for some reason never felt, alive for me.
Of course, that did come with knowing that this very feeling would live inside of me until the very moment happened.
I would have to be there to save her, from her own carefree mind, which she followed a little too recklessly.
But just as that thought ran through me, I jumped.
My phone buzzing next to the kitchen sink pulled me out of the daze of washing the exact same glass for the seventh time.
I put down the glass. My heart stopped as I saw her name.
Molly. I instantly opened the text message. There was no hello, no how are you. No small talk at all. All the message said was:
An Island out from the Hamptons, undiscoverable by well… almost everyone. A couple of hours by helicopter, longer by boat. I’ve found our Mockingbird.
I knew I wasn’t fucking crazy. I knew that I felt something was up. But as I read the final line again. Our Mockingbird. This was not what I was expecting.
“Jordan,” I called out to my husband who was working from home today of all days and who had thankfully closed the door, so he didn’t have to be the brunt of all of the emotions that I was feeling.
“Yes,” I heard his muffled voice call out from down the hall.
“I’m heading out.”
“Okay,” he screamed back.
Where I was going and how long that I was going to be was not something that I needed to give him the details of right now. Because well, I couldn’t even answer that for myself.
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