If Only She Knew

23. Special

"Yes. If it will lead to the truth."

The guards let go of Ariana, locked up the door and left.

"You still didn't tell me why I'm being treated like a criminal. They said I'm a criminal!" Ariana gestured with a hand over her shoulder. "You're keeping something big away from me."

"I'm sorry Ariana. I'll do anything I can to help you but right now we need the truth," Jacob pleaded.

Ariana nodded as she sat down.

She said, "What do you need me to do, now?"

This would be tricky, Jacob thought and opened an envelope. Then he was holding a picture of Simon Tatman Taylor. One of Ariana's best, oldest friends.

He handed the photograph to Ariana. She looked at it, surprised. She blinked her eyes. It was a photograph of a shirtless dark haired guy full of tattoos. He had Simon's handsome, slightly girlish face with full lips, beautiful nose and electric blue eyes.

She's seen this photograph before, of course.

"Simon. Why are you showing me this photograph now?" Ariana frowned.

She knew Simon well. She had known him for at least ten years.

*Flashback*

Eleven years ago...

When Ariana was fifteen she was avidly suffering of depression.

Since she had witnessed her mother's death, she couldn't sleep right and the scene played over and over again in her mind: she remenbered her mother being clearly attacked by a hooded figure who wanted something from her mother that her mother didn't want to give away.

She still remembered her mother's long golden hair sloshing through the air and the gunshot sound... The gunshot that killed her.

She fell unconscious then and woke up in the hospital with a concussion but nothing serious.

She was aware that the killer had spared her. She was alive.

But she couldn't just move on from her mother's death, long after her funeral. Ariana kept bringing white lilies, her mother's favorite flowers, to her grave long after, accompanied by her brother Aaron who was 19 at the time.

The trauma manifested itself in both her night-time and waking life, through nightmares, insomnia, headaches, tiredness and depression, anxiety, fear of death and helplessness.

Ariana felt vulnerable because she was just a little girl who couldn't even bring justice to her mother. She couldn't catch the killer and the police seemed unable to, as well.

She cried everyday and felt so weak. Her father assigned her a psychotherapist, assuring her she'll feel better because therapy helped him reconcile with her death as well. The therapist diagnosed her with PTSD, and supervised her treatment.

Ariana begged her father to find the killer as he was the CEO of a big company and could use all resources and had connections. He assured the teen, broken girl that ever since the start he spared no efforts to trace the killer but he also explained to her that the killer was very good and left no evidence, made no mistake so it couldn't be helped.

Ariana could well remember how much the idea of an untraceable killer affected her and scared her.

It seemed so big...

But since she was just a teen and focused on the immediate emotional pain and couldn't see much beyond the hole in her heart, she hadn't paid too much attention to her mother's killer and the fact that he was free.