How She Came Home

Chapter Sixty-Seven

Note: Why are you so hopeful that Freen's alive? I'm betting that she's dead-dead. That this is Becca's villain origin story hahaha😈

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It took Becca until the sun was fully up to allow her mom to coax her from her car and into the dark house. The key shook in her hand as she fitted it into the lock and opened it, the yawning silence and emptiness feeling foreboding, and she had to stand on the threshold for another ten minutes, Rawee standing behind her, exercising her patience until Becca took that first step over the lip of the door.

Slowly setting her bag down on the bench in the foyer, Becca kicked off her shoes and moved through the house, switching on lights as Rawee trailed after her. 

Standing in the middle of the open kitchen and dining room, Becca was dimly aware of her mom using the coffee machine, the rattle of biscuits in the dog bowl and running water, the back door letting in a gust of fresh air to sweep away the staleness of the untouched house. It was pristine, Eve having been there in her absence, but it didn't feel like home .

Shooed upstairs to shower and changed into something clean, Becca came back down to a cup of black coffee and her mom staring into an empty fridge. 

Sipping her coffee as she cradled the cup and let the heat seep into her cold fingers, she felt the tiniest bit better, soft- skinned and pink-cheeked and clean. While she sipped her coffee, Rawee sat before her laptop and put in a grocery order to be delivered before she shepherded Becca into the front living room.

"How about we play chess?" she suggested.

Shrugging, Becca flopped down on the sofa, in front of the black pieces, and let her mom make the first move. It was the most engagement she'd shown in an activity in two weeks but she still lost the first game, and then the second and third. 

Under normal circumstances her mom would've chastised her for not putting in enough effort, for not running through sequences ahead of time or thinking a move through, but Rawee seemed pleased that she was at least making the effort to do something. T

hey played for a couple of hours, until the groceries were delivered and Rawee went to put it all away. Becca helped, silently shoving lettuce and zucchinis and carrots into the correct spots, dimly wondering what her mom was going to do with them seeing as neither of them could cook.

She heard her on the phone to Nun a while after that as she watered the herbs in the garden, keeping her voice down while Becca made herself another cup of coffee and tried to eavesdrop. 

Guilt ate away at her, embarrassment flushing her pallid cheeks pink as she shifted from foot to foot, but she was too proud to even mention it to her mother and quickly vanished up to her office after that.

Pacing the length of the brownstone as she nursed her coffee, Becca ran her fingertips along the spines of the books lining the shelves and came to a sudden stop as she hit the thick spine of a battered paperback. 

It was the first book that Freen had ever lent her, the pages fuzzy with Freen's tears, quotes highlighted in neon yellow and the corners dog-eared. 

Becca had kept the movie tickets from their first date to see Pride and Prejudice inside it, tucked away somewhere safe and meaningful, a first within another first, and it gave her pause as she stared at it. 

The irrational side of her grief wanted to take the book and tear it in half but the rest of her wanted to cradle it in her trembling hands and let her own tears soak into the ink, blurring it some more with her own heartbreak.

Scrubbing a hand over her face, Becca walked over to her desk and flopped down onto the seat, purposely avoiding looking at the framed photo of Freen on her desk as she reached out and set it face-down, knowing her resolve to keep it together for the rest of the day would fail abysmally if she looked.