Page 7 of Rock the Boat
One Month Later…
Healing of the body took time. Of the mind…there was a chance I would never be the same again. A mind can become twisted and menacing, forever warped.
I did everything I could not to believe Dom, did everything to remain true to Matthew and his love for me. Dom had to be wrong, and I had been determined to prove it.
I couldn’t.
The day after I woke up in Dom’s clinic, he brought me his computer. I searched for anything I could find to prove my case. I was a scientist and knew how to dig until I uncovered the facts. Staring back at me was everything I feared. The real Matthew Black did not exist. The man I had been engaged to was Matthew Blum. I should give him credit for sticking close to his real name. He was into a little bit of everything, none of it any good. I still wasn’t sure why he left me for dead or why he continued to text my parents, but that didn’t matter much to me any longer.
I was already dead because he had killed me.
Oh, physically, I still existed and had survived, but I would never be the same again. Shy and unassuming, I blended in with the furniture and wallpaper. No one ever noticed me. I lived to learn, to broaden my knowledge. People confused me and scared me. A LOT. But I thought Matthew was different. He chose me. He saved me from myself and others. And then I found out it was all a lie.
I still didn’t have all of the puzzle pieces, maybe I never would, but I had enough. The funny thing about the heart was it could race and jolt when someone was happy or excited. It could physically hurt when someone was sad. These were all things scientists had a lot of theories about, had done studies on, but much like many things found in the universe, the scientists still didn’t understand it completely. Maybe they never would.
My heart no longer raced with fear or excitement or clenched with the pain of betrayal. It had grown cold and unfeeling. It beat to keep me alive, and sometimes I wondered why it did that. Why did I survive that night?
It had been a month since I’d woken up in Dom’s clinic, hidden away from prying eyes. I was grateful to him. He nursed me back to health, gave me a place to stay, and helped me in any way he could. But there are some things not even a skilled doctor could heal and some scars that would never go away.
Lifting my hand, I touched the small line of red that had been carved into my skin when I saw Matthew walk out of my old apartment with a box under his arm. Why? What was he doing here?
I watched him, followed him. Periodically, he would take something out of his pocket, look down, and then return it. One of those times, he pulled out my cell phone. He still had it. If I was the old me, I might think he held onto it for sentimental reasons, but I knew better, and when he dropped it on the ground and threw it in a fountain, I felt nothing. It did not surprise me. There would be no more texts or notifications to my parents. To Matthew, the path that led back to me had come to an end.
Or so he thought.
Sometimes when the mind became broken and twisted, dangerous things happened.
