Chapter 5
SIX DAYS LATER
“How are you holding up, man?” Micah Simmons asked.
I glared at him from behind the sunglasses that I wore to block out the sun.
The day that Lena died, it rained all evening and all night.
I hated that it chose to be a beautiful day today when I was closing a chapter of my life.
I felt like the world was ending, but today surely didn’t reflect that.
“I’m not,” I mumbled.
“What?”
“I’m hanging in here, dude,” I replied only slightly louder. People offered platitudes, but they weren’t ready to hear the truth.
He nodded as though he understood that. “We’ve all been praying for you. We’ve got your back. You coming back any time soon?”
I shrugged my shoulders. “I don’t know.”
“Take your time. It’s never easy losing a partner, no matter how you lose them. When you face a situation like yours and they’re taken in a manner that you fight against daily, it definitely makes it more difficult,” Gavin Tinsley chimed in.
“Any news on the investigation?” I asked.
Carson Jennings shrugged. “He’s not talking. They’re getting him a psych evaluation, but from what I’ve learned, the child that she was pregnant with wasn’t his.”
“What are you talking about?”
“It’s not so hard to believe, Fullwood. I mean, after all, they were divorcing.
She may have been cheating on him or leaving him for another man.
I’ve heard that there were some text messages exchanged between her and someone she had listed under ‘That Guy’ in her phone.
Sounds to me like she was having an affair,” Carson answered.
I sighed and turned to look over my shoulder where Lena’s mother was being escorted to her car.
“Did she mention it to you?” Tinsley asked.
“Hey, I want to holler at her mom.”
“Take it easy,” Micah stated.
“Hope to see you back soon, bro,” Tinsley professed.
I turned my back on them and threw up a hand, waving goodbye, but never looking back at them.
With long, slow strides, I made my way in the direction Mrs. Jones had just walked.
Lena had looked so peaceful lying in that casket, but she didn’t look like the Lena I had known.
With all the makeup they added, she looked very different than she would normally look.
She had never been the type to apply lots of makeup. She had always lightly applied it, opting for a natural look whenever she chose to wear it. Her hair was pulled back stiffly from her face in a bun, something she had only worn once, and that was for her pictures fresh out of the police academy.
“Mrs. Jones,” I called out as I drew closer.
She stopped and turned. The shaky smile on her lips grew a little bit wider, and her grim expression softened a little. She reached her arms out and held them open to me. I went into them, needing to feel her comforting embrace.
“I just wanted to extend my condolences again. If there’s anything you need at all, you’ve got my number. Please don’t be afraid to call, and don’t think you’re being a burden. It would be my honor to serve you in any way,” I professed.
She kissed my cheek and then patted both of them. After she pulled back and stared into my eyes, she squinted hers and replied, “You’re such a good man. You have done her proud. There’s nothing for you to be worried about or ashamed of, Officer Fullwood.”
She patted my cheeks once more and then left. The comment she made was cryptic, but I shook my head and walked to my car. As I drove back to the only place that I spent any time these days aside from my home, I thought back to the night that I lost Lena.
When I left the accident, it was in the back of the ambulance with the EMTs who recognized me.
As I suspected, the woman’s husband had died on impact, but the trucker had survived, as had the woman, although barely.
I headed to the hospital with all the thoughts of that night turning over in my mind.
“Hey, I didn’t expect to see you here today,” the tall brown-skinned woman with brownish-blonde dreads stated, walking into the room.
She wore scrubs as she had every time before.
But today, she had her dreads pulled back into a ponytail, and she had applied makeup, as though she were going someplace immediately after leaving the hospital.
“Why wouldn’t I be?”
“It’s just that I know you buried your partner today. A few of us sent flowers and a cash donation to the funeral home to be given to her family. I’ve been praying for you as well,” she stated hesitantly, as she finally moved further into the room.
“Thank you. I appreciate that.”
She stood on the opposite side of the bed from where I sat. I watched as she pushed Sevyn’s hair back from her forehead and then lifted her hands to check her nails.
“Girl, we have to get those nails done soon. You would be having a fit if you saw how chipped your polish was and how those cuticles need to be done. It’s time for a fill-in too.
” She chatted happily as though there weren’t monitors around us beeping away, and as if the woman lying in the bed was wide awake and able to respond.
I hadn’t seen her eyes since I accompanied her to the hospital the night of the accident. She had been awake before she was loaded into the ambulance. She had passed out from the pain eventually, and the doctors had induced a coma to reduce the swelling on her brain.
“Tell me about her.” I knew nothing about her other than that her name was Sevyn Aurora Shields, she was twenty-five, the man in the car with her was her husband, she had no kids, and she was a geriatric social worker.
Over the last week, she had a couple of coworkers stop by to visit, but no family.
“What do you want to know?” the woman, whose name was Waverleigh, asked as she pulled up a chair.
That was one other thing that I knew. Waverleigh Collins was her best friend and a pediatric nurse at the hospital. Like me, she came up here to this floor to visit Sevyn daily. There was one difference: She came because she was her best friend and not out of guilt.
“Anything. Everything.”
“Tell me something, and I’ll tell you what you want to know.”
I nodded. “Okay. What do you want to know?”
“You said you were there the night of the accident, right?”
“Yeah.”
“I know that I’ve seen you volunteering around here in the past. But do you volunteer for the people you’ve served in the community? I mean, do you always check on people who you’ve been called to the scene of their accident in the days following, or are you assigned people to volunteer for?”
Her question made me nervous. I wondered how much she may have figured out already.
“When it’s a bad one, I do.”
“Why do you visit her every day?”
“Because no one else does but you, and I don’t want her to wake up all alone. So, I’ll do my part as much as possible. To answer your question, I asked if I could be assigned to her because I was there the night of her accident.” Some of what I said was true, but not all of it.
She turned her lips down at that. “That’s because she has no one else.”
I suspected as much from the length of time I had spent by her side. I hated lying to Waverleigh, but she didn’t need to know the real reason.
It was already my fault that her husband died in the accident, just as much as I was to blame for Lena being shot by her husband, Paul. Thank God that the truck driver survived the accident, and no one else was hurt that night.
“Well, let’s see, where can I start? She was an only child whose mother died during childbirth, and her father died when she was just thirteen.
He had a brain aneurysm, and that left her to be raised by his mother.
She loved Grams with everything that she had.
We all did. The day that she had the accident, her grandmother had just died that morning. ”
The wind was sucked from my lungs upon hearing that news. My audible gasp wasn’t unnoticed because Waverleigh nodded, while I sat there with my fingers steepled together, staring at her with wide eyes.
“Yeah, she lost her grandmother that morning and her husband that night. The three of us were all she had in this world. We buried Grams today, and it hurt knowing that she wasn’t there to tell Grams goodbye.
That’s not something that she will be able to take easily when she wakes up and realizes what has happened. ”
“I can imagine that will be difficult.”
“Although she didn’t have any other family, Sevyn is a very likeable person.
People adore her wherever she goes, whether it’s her clients and their families, the staff that she works with at the nursing homes, the people here at the hospital when she visits and volunteers, or the person in the grocery store. She’s very likeable and well-loved.”
“Why is that?”
“Well, I guess because she’s naturally a caretaker.
She’s always looking out for other people and putting them before herself.
I have often had to get on her about that, though, because she’ll put other people’s needs before her own and neglect herself.
She often has difficulty maintaining personal boundaries, and that makes her easily accessible to others.
They sometimes take advantage of her good nature. ”
She stroked Sevyn’s cheek and kissed it sweetly.
“She loves traveling and Mediterranean food. God that girl loves Mediterranean food. She watches crime shows and always tries to predict who did it, how they’ll get caught, and what will happen next.”
“Does she listen to music?”
“Yep. Jazz and R and B. She loves Chris Perry, Jovi Noelle, and Solemn. Her favorite colors are purple and yellow.”
“She sounds like she’s perfect,” I teased, watching how the woman stared adoringly at Sevyn.