Their Masks

The Assistant's Mask (Part 2)

Mitchelle's life was now without meaning.

She had lost the reason for her endurance in the morning. The reason she got up to do what she did. The reason she had put up with the rich girl's demands and needs for four years.

The reason she had believed better days were ahead in her life.

Most of what Lexi had told her didn't make it past her comprehension. But the most important parts did. Her father had died in his sleep, just as he had confided to her was his wish long ago. This was all in the past week, and their mother was struck with emotional numbness that she did next to nothing these days. No change there from her last months of her husband's hospitalization.

Lexi was asking her sister to come back home so they could scatter their father's ashes in the meadows. He had expressed his need to lay with the beautiful flowers just a few miles outside the town.

That was about all Mitchelle gleaned before the pain started swelling in her chest like a balloon. She didn't know how to make it stop. Every breath of air she took only inflated it more. Every tear she spilled seemed to warrant more from her. She was an emotional wreck by the time she arrived at the hanger to pick up her boss.

The driver was the first person to notice anything was wrong with her. But that had to be because she and he were closer than most people ever knew in their world of celebrities and models.

He wanted to take her away from here. Let her grieve in peace without the pompous brat working her hard on things that had no meaning whatsoever. Mitchelle couldn't accept that. She had no reason to leave her work because of something she had known would happen one of these days.

She had told him about her life. Confided her deepest secrets with him because in this life, she had never expected to find someone who would love her as he did. But that was just it. They both knew about this day coming. This was no surprise to anyone.

That was why Mitchelle didn't understand why it pained her so much to see it come to pass.

She had no time for pleasantries when Amelia descended from her plane, looking as lavish as the last time Mitchelle had seen her.

Somehow it didn't seem fair that the world would be made this way. Why would this girl have to be happy and satisfied with her life when others were suffering in theirs?

What justice existed in this world that such a thing was allowable? Mitchelle knew she worried the driver with the blank mask she had on now. There was nothing in her anymore. She had no love left to give to this life she had chased after.

Years and years of putting on a mask that would benefit her family had been a worthy cause. She had lied to herself for so long that she was doing this because it was her dream. But in reality, her dream had ended the very moment she had joined this life and her father was confined to that hospital bed.

She was listing off the things she had done for the girl with a smile she was not familiar with. The smile she had practiced for years to show to her employer was hard to maintain now. She did not have enough motivation to keep it up.

Mitchelle was sure the girl had no use in remembering such things as her name, let alone her smile. This life she had run to as an attempt to avoid her problems at home was meaningless now. There would never come a day when she would forgive herself for leaving her family behind to be in service of this rich girl who had no idea just what it meant to suffer.

She needed to leave. She needed to see Lexi. She needed to stand before her mother and ask for forgiveness for being a coward for four years.

But just how was she going to do that?

Yes... your resignation.

Amelia Ventica was a mask that existed in Mitchelle's life to always bark orders and mean comments. She was not surprised when the girl was firing her after all she had done for the rich brat.

She was surprised that it was the first good deed her employer had done for her in four years.