Destroy Me

21 // THE CIRCUS IS IN TOWN

AS I WANDERED DOWN the stairs, the first thing I noticed was Lindsay sitting amidst hundreds of photos. I looked at her in confusion and she grinned before outstretching a photo for me.

I took it off of her and looked at it. I was with Isiah and Elijah at, what looked like, their tenth birthday party. I remembered it so well because it was a key point in mine and Elijah's timeline. Almost six months prior to their party, Elijah had started being mean to me.

At their party, Elijah had shoved me into the cake. It was clearly his fault, but because it was his birthday, I had gotten in trouble. The picture was of Isiah checking if I was okay, covered in cake, while Elijah was in the background with a huge grin on his face.

"What are you doing Linds?" I asked and put the photo back on the ground.

"I found them in the spare room," she told me.

"The spare room?" I scoffed. "What are you going to do with the room?"

"I'm cleaning it out," she shrugged. "There's boxes of photos Dev. Look through some of them with me."

"I've got nothing better to do," I shrugged and pushed some out of the way to sit down.

"I've got piles going," she explained and pointed to one. "There's one for each of us, Vince, me, you and dad, then a bigger one for things like group photos and parties and stuff."

"You're organising them now?" I rose an eyebrow at her and grabbed one.

"Yeah," she shrugged. "I mean, don't you want something to show your kids when they're your age?"

"I guess," I muttered. The photo I'd grabbed was of my parents when the were in college. My mum had this ridiculous perm and dad's hair reached his ass. I put it in his pile and grabbed another. It continued like that for a while, the two of us just sorting through the photos until I heard her laugh.

She showed me a picture of the two of us at the park. We'd been on the monkey bars and I slipped and fell. There was a huge pile of mud under the bars and I'd fallen right into it.

"I hate that picture," I shook my head. "Dad, instead of helping me, pulled his camera out. What kind of a parent does that?"

"A great kind," she smirked and tossed it onto the group pile. The next picture I picked up made me smile a little.

It was a picture of Vincent and Jessie from when they first started dating. They were both still in high school, probably year ten, and it was the first time that Jessie had come to one of our Christmas dinners. Christmases were always huge at our house as we had about a million family members.

Our cousins from our mother's side, however, were hilariously dramatic and Gracie had gotten her first car from her parents as a present. The first thing she'd done was crash it into the pole at the end of the street. She was completely fine, but it gave Jessie the fright of her life.

Then I noticed something other than Jessie's terrified face, her necklace.

"I-I'll be right back," I stammered and shot up to my bedroom. I pulled my desk drawer open and rummaged through until I found it, the dragonfly necklace that Elijah had found in his room.

I held it beside the photo for a better comparison and sure enough, it was the same one.

I stared at the necklace, which had aged in the approximate seven years since Vincent had given it to her, and I wasn't sure whether my heart had stopped beating or I'd stopped breathing. I just knew that I was dying.

It was Jessie's necklace. Jessie's necklace in Elijah's room. She wasn't just cheating on Vincent with Isiah, she was doing it with Elijah too.

I put both items in the drawer and closed it. Elijah was a different person now. Military school changed him and now we were together, there's no way he would ever cheat on me.