Point of No Return Chloe
Point of No Return
Chloe
Twenty Years Ago
That fated night of the Grand March and prom, the night that Eden died, Andrew left Chloe at the door with a kiss and a promise to come over in the morning so they could go for a run together.
Chloe floated into the house, up the stairs, tiptoeing softly so she wouldn’t wake her parents.
The night had been perfect. She was in love.
She and Andrew had planned their future.
Their future together! It didn’t matter that she was young, that her parents would say she was being silly, that you don’t meet “the one” in high school.
She knew this was different. They both did.
Andrew was always going to be the love of her life. She would do anything to make sure nothing got in the way of that.
She felt so grown up that her parents weren’t waiting for her in the living room.
And also relieved, because she thought her mother would probably take one look at her and know exactly what she and Andrew had been doing in the back of his truck.
She was sore. Even with all his tenderness and precautions, it had hurt worse than she expected.
She was also bleeding a little; she could feel the trickle between her legs.
She needed a pad and needed to wash off the remains of her makeup.
She’d deal with her teased hair in the morning.
The bathroom door was locked. That wasn’t entirely unusual; it joined both Eden’s bedroom and the hallway.
Chloe’s bedroom was across the hall, and they shared the bathroom.
Eden sometimes forgot to unlock the hall door when she went to bed, so a key was hidden on the jamb above.
Chloe retrieved it and unlocked the door. Flipped on the light.
Eden was in the bathtub. She was extremely pale, and the water was red.
Why was the water red?
It took Chloe a minute to understand, to comprehend, what was happening. Then she screamed for her mother.
Three deep vertical slashes in each wrist. Eden hadn’t been joking around. She’d lost so much blood, the water looked like cherry Kool-Aid.
The ambulance arrived in minutes, and the police.
They thundered up the stairs, shoved her aside.
Chloe didn’t want to watch, but she couldn’t help herself.
The unfamiliar terms: arterial, hemorrhage, cardiac arrest, resuscitate.
The frantic but measured actions: moving Eden to the gurney, chest compressions, starting an IV, oxygen hissing up her nose.
The pained look on the EMT’s kind face; Officer Lee with her notepad out; her mother screaming; her father behind the wheel, tears streaming down his cheeks.
“We’re losing her, we’re losing her.”
Eden’s blood, on all of them.
Somehow, they saved her. Brought her back from the dead in the ambulance. At the hospital, the EMT commended Chloe. If she hadn’t found her sister when she did, Eden definitely wouldn’t have made it.
Malogen’s small hospital didn’t have a psychiatric unit, but the next town over did, so once Eden was patched up and stabilized, she was transferred there.
Chloe visited the first weekend after her sister’s attempted suicide. Eden wouldn’t talk to her.
Every weekend, for the next six weeks, Chloe came, and Eden refused to talk. She wouldn’t tell anyone why she tried to take her life.
But Chloe knew. Somewhere deep in her heart, she knew that while she was pledging her life and her body to Andrew Locke, her sister was in deep psychic pain, dragging a razor blade across her tender flesh.
The question was, Why?
Eden hated Andrew. That wasn’t a secret. The two of them were never going to be friends; there was always friction in their interactions.
Was she just that jealous of her little sister being the belle of the ball?
Or was it something else?
Something darker?
Chloe resolved to find out. She loved Andrew, and she loved her sister, and she needed to find a way to get them reconciled, because he was going to be a part of their lives for a very long time.