witness || h.s.|| ON HOLD

twenty || idle time is the devil's play

The song for this chapter is Had Some Drinks by Two Feet :)

Tate

I spent hours just sitting on the floor, with an array of books strewn out in front of me. Some of them were photography books, others were almanacs, a few of them were novels, and I was mindlessly lost in all of them, desperately trying to pass the time with anything other than talking to Harry.

I don't quite know why he showed such a distaste for me. I understood it initially, when he was under the impression that I was some undercover mastermind, but now that he knows I am innocent of that, I'm not really sure why I left such a bad taste in his mouth.

Perhaps I was just a nuisance, he did admit that he would much rather be killing people than having to babysit me. Although in my mind, having to deal with a twenty-year-old girl seemed much more appealing than committing murder, but to each their own, I suppose.

From the looks of it, Harry was doing his best to avoid me too, as he sat in one of the barstools at the kitchen counter, hunched over his computer, and typing some things every few minutes.

It's not like I was trying to be best friends with Harry, he still terrified me to my very core. But I suppose all of this idle time was giving my mind the opportunity to wander into dark places, and I just wanted some sort of company to pull myself out of the darkest corners of my mind.

I couldn't stop thinking about the men that Harry and Will killed, or the fact that those same men were most likely on their way to kidnap or kill me. It completely overwhelmed me to think that just last week, I was just another friendly face, someone who would smile at you as you entered a restaurant, a daughter who never misbehaved, and did everything in her power to make her mother happy. And now? I was the center of attention for some of the evilest and cruel people on the planet.

The saying, "it's a small world," applied to my situation in the most painfully high level. How I just so happened to pick up Harry's knife, thinking I was doing a good deed by trying to reunite it with its owner. How James just so happened to ask to walk me home, not knowing that he was in some sort of alliance with Harry and his organization. How Harry thought that I was involved in his field of work, and it turned out, he was right, just in a different way. The way that Reggie and I followed Harry's car to his flat, and now, I was sat inside on the floor of it, meddling through Harry's collection of books.

And perhaps the strangest and most small the world had been? Learning that Harry's father and mine kept identical journals. I don't know why he wasn't willing to consider any possibilities for why that might be, but I had a feeling if I kept pushing him on the matter, it wouldn't end well for me.

I couldn't help but wonder what would have happened if I had just left that knife on the ground. Would Harry and I never have met? Would James never walk home with me that night? Would I still be safe and sound in my own home? Or perhaps it wasn't a matter of coincidence or a wrong place at the wrong time scenario. Perhaps this was what my life was destined to entail all along, one way or another.

My mind drifted to my mother. I wondered if she knew of my father's involvement with this software, and had decided to keep it from me for my own protection. Or my uncle, who guarded my father's journal as though his life depended on it, and maybe it did. Or maybe, just maybe, they were both as blissfully ignorant of the situation as I had been, as I wish I still was.

My heart lurched as I thought of my mother. Thinking of her pacing around our apartment, wondering where I had gone. Wondering if I was alive and if she would ever see her only child again. I imagined her eyes weak from a lack of sleep, due to the restless nights she would spend aching for me to return. I wondered if she even knew I was missing yet, as it had only been a few days. The people that Harry worked for were smart, and even though it made me sick to admit it, Harry was smart. Perhaps they managed to cover my disappearance up, for the time being, meaning that my mother had not yet been struck down by the grief of my absence.