Chapter 98 Three Weeks Later Laura
Three Weeks Later
Laura
She likes to think of herself as an educated, articulate woman.
But Laura struggles to put into words the emotions she feels watching somebody die and knowing she is responsible.
It’s a more intimate experience than sex, more profound than offering your body to someone who is craving the same pleasure as you.
She feels more connected to a person she barely knows in their final throes of life than she does her own daughters.
And the second she can inhale their last, desperate breaths is like no other sensation.
It’s more powerful than the most intense of orgasms, or the moment you realise you are hopelessly and completely in love.
Or even the first time you feel your newborn child pressed against your chest. It’s why when Laura holds their last, treasured breaths inside her, it’s like she’s protecting a precious jewel in a vault.
People in pain, like Damon, place themselves in her care because she understands them better than anyone else in the world.
She knows what’s best for them. She alleviates their suffering and brings all that is bad in their lives to an end.
She will save them from themselves. She truly is a Good Samaritan.
Today, she sits in a café downstairs in the nursing home where she volunteers, her hands wrapped tightly around a mug, but not drinking from it.
The patio doors are open, allowing the July sunshine to creep indoors, but she chooses to remain inside, distracted by the memory of finally killing Damon.
She has no doubt that when he answered the door to her, he knew how this was going to end.
Discussion was unnecessary. All that mattered were actions.
In fact, she’s sure that if he were being honest with himself, it’s what he’d wanted all along, from the first time they corresponded on the online message boards.
After that initial encounter back in the spring, Laura kept herself to herself for a while.
But she missed feeding from the despair of the desperate.
She hungered for it. And she couldn’t stop thinking about Damon.
He was unfinished business. Then later, when she realised who Damon was and how, unbeknownst to him, she had been responsible for shaping much of his life, she saw an opportunity.
To have blood from both mother and son on her hands.