ON YOUR LAST BREATH | Mike Schmidt ✔️

chapter one .. getting lucky once

CHAPTER ONE —    " getting lucky once "

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          BY ALL MEANS OF LOGIC, Haley Anne shouldn't have been there. In fact, if there was some lengthy list of places where she was expected to be at, the town's swimming club was the very last on that long list, counted with an asterisk, as an optional.

Yet there she was, oxygen tank in her backpack, dropped at her feet, and rollerskates for shoes. A second pair of rollerskates hung heavy in a plastic bag she occupied the seat next to her with.

She tried not to think about any of it while she sat there, waiting, in the reception area. Having started returning regularly to that spot, after years of righteously avoiding it — everything that had happened when she was ten years old made her not only entitled to want to avoid the building at all costs, but also unfit to ever take on competitive swimming again —, Haley figured out the best way of not poking that one nightmare of her childhood was to sit right underneath the same old muted TV and keep her eyes pointed down on the book punished to forever be carried in her backpack, with no prospect of ever being finished.

It was duty that forced her to sit there, indulging in a not so light read for a good ten minutes before the time she was supposed to be there actually arrived. Haley preferred to be early, a trait which by no means was she shocked it had followed her so far into adulthood — she loathed to keep people waiting, which is perhaps exactly what made her such a wonderful event planner.

"Boo!" Abby caught the top of the open book and pulled it down, collapsing forward in a hug where her arms didn't even get the strength to wrap around Haley fully. Either way, the child sighed away into a little giggle.

"I take today's practice was tiring?" Haley lifted her hand to check the dryness of Abby's hair, satisfied to see that she didn't hurry to get there so much that she would neglect drying her hair.

"You think?!" Abby straightened up, her gaze quickly moving onto the bag with rollerskates waiting for her. She picked it up and sat right next to her brother's girlfriend to start putting the skates on. "You always made swimming sound so easy, but I can barely feel my arms anymore." After a short pause however, Abby lifted her eyes, adding a little shyer than before, "However, it is quite fun."

Haley laughed. She's tried her best her whole life to leave that incident from her childhood in a rust box, in a dark corner of her mind. They never caught the man that followed her, they never found his car either, and though security camera proved she wasn't lying, a few adults scorned that she must have exaggerated half of the story too. In order to not go utterly insane, Haley adopted into that ignorance the older she got — Maybe I did in fact remember some things wrong, she told herself every now and then, before falling right back into paranoia, locking every single door in her house before going to bed, just in case.

However, since Mike Schmidt and his sister showed up in her life, Haley had to admit, she felt for the first time in her life since her lungs had started failing her truly invincible; she believed this was the final step she needed to take in order to fully moving on.

Abby was an 11-year old delight to be around, full of energy and life, a colorful daily reminder for Haley as to why she liked working with kids so much; it was for her sake that she stomped over her silly fears and returned to the swimming club as a responsible adult and she knew, if need ever came for such a thing, she would most likely even agree to walk the streets at night too, just for Abby.