Ashley's Asylum (3)

28 | Ashleys Asylum

Under the cover of night, Ashley slipped out of the house the same way she had slipped in only hours before leaving Ben unwittingly asleep in bed. The street around her home was luckily quiet, so in fact, when she scuffed her shoes against the pavement it echoed.

Ashley travelled light with a duffel bag loaded full of clothes, essential toiletries, snacks and a few keepsakes. She needed to be light on her feet and unnoticeable and lugging a suitcase around hardly achieved either of those things. It was hard to know what to take knowing it would be all she held to her name by morning.

She visited a cash machine near her home and withdrew the maximum amount from her account before breaking the card in half and tossing it away. As a precaution, she changed her outfit afterwards in a small supermarket toilet and placed a hat on to obscure her identity from any CCTV.

Ashley didn't want the police to track her, if she led them to Michael he would suspect it was done purposely and that would be disastrous. To avoid being found via her phone she brought a map in the supermarket and sat outside planning her journey. She wrote down a couple of phone numbers on the back of the map before she destroyed her Sim card and dumped the phone a safe distance from the supermarket down a drain. It made her skin crawl to give up what she considered essentials in her everyday life. It was as if she were scrubbing out her existence bit by bit.

With her journey planned, Ashley caught a late night bus, the first of many, and sat at the back to keep away from the few other passengers. She wore a black hooded jumper and kept the hood up over her hat to hide her hair which was still noticeably white.

She fidgeted upon her seat, chewing on the inside of her lip nervously as the bus pulled away from the stop.

Was she really doing this?

The bus stopped at the traffic lights just down the road.

Last chance to turn back.

Her pale eyes darted around the bus as a surge of panic devoured her.

Was this the right decision? Doing this meant never going home, never knowing the comfort of family again or the pleasure of friendship. Peace would be forever unattainable; normality a distant memory.

The traffic lights turned green and the engine rumbled underneath her seat. Ashley closed her eyes in resignation and lent her head against the window.

This was happening.

Ashley tried not to think of Ben and Kate when they realised she was gone. She hoped at the very least Kate would understand why she had left not that it would make her absence any less painful. Ashley had to put things right and this was the only way she knew how despite the danger and her own doubts.

The truth was simple, Ashley was doing this to save lives even though there was no guarantee it would work. She was terrified to return to her abusers but her mind skirted around the fact to avoid a full-fledged panic attack. If she allowed herself to dwell on the reality that she was willingly placing herself in reach of Michael and his possessive, erratic behaviour she'd go mad. The idea that Sam could be waiting for her too wasn't even worth entertaining if she wanted to keep her nerve. Being with Michael and Sam again was her worst nightmare but living like she currently was, was soul destroying.

At least now the general public had a reason to dig their teeth into her. Ashley had carried everyone's suspicions on her shoulders since arriving home and it made her bitter to fall into the mold the media and police had made for her, the 'fake survivor' with bad blood. There was little she could do to change the public's views of her and frankly the further she travelled the less it seemed to matter. All the petty problems she had ever worried about, that everyone was guilty of worrying about, meant nothing now.