Someone I Used to Know - By Blakney Francis Page 0,34

and someone faraway was screaming in a language I couldn’t understand.

My ears perked up suspiciously. I thought about all the unusual pleasantness that had fallen my way. Why was everyone being so nice?

“Ominous?”

“Yeah, well I’m still on the email list for the revised call sheets, and when I saw they were filming the adoption scene today, I was worried about you.”

“Adoption scene?” I felt numb. I finally found the ominous tone Cam had been looking for all along.

Someone started speaking to Cam on his end of the line, and he rattled off a few muffled words in reply.

“Look, Ads, I’ve got to go, but I wish I could be there with you,” he said regretfully, coming back to me.

I nodded, which was ridiculous. He couldn’t see me, but words had left me.

“I love you.” His voice was a sigh, as unhelpful as a rowboat during a hurricane.

I nodded again and hung up.

For the rest of the day, I avoided Madeline like she was contagious with a flesh-eating virus. There would be no deep analysis of Adley Adair that day. This was one wound that would never heal enough to pick at. It was an oozing sore, perched angrily on my soul, and I wore it unashamedly. Not because I was proud of it, but because I deserved it.

I’d earned the pain.

Madeline let me be. I thought I’d have to fight her on it. Maybe, she’d even have me fired. After all, refusing her was refusing to do the job I’d been brought here to do. I supposed it was possible that, for once, Madeline didn’t need my input to understand what I’d done. She could read my heartless actions right off the page, without any help from me at all.

For whatever reasons, I was left to my solitude. Shivering and secluded in the back of soundstage three, I watched with vulgar interest as they set the stage.

This was not a set I could critique for being inaccurate. The constructed hospital was as cold and impersonal as the one where’d I’d given birth.

I tried to look at anything other than the hospital bed where a team prepped Madeline, brushing powder over face until she looked sickly pale, and misting her hair so it would plaster around her face. I didn’t want to see, but I couldn’t look away.

The lights and focus sucked me back to the fake Adley Adair again and again. Her body was dwarfed by the bed, making her appear unbearably childlike. There was plenty of room for Declan to climb in beside her when Georgia called for him to take his mark.

I didn’t want to see. More than anything, I wanted to turn away, but my focus zoomed in on them with more intensity than I thought I possessed. And the harder I stared, the more Madeline and Declan disintegrated before my eyes.

All I could see was myself. It was amazing how easily my mind slipped back to that forbidden place I’d never allowed it to linger before. I’d spent so much time making sure the door to that night could never be opened, sealing up every crevice and crack, until I was sure nothing could ever escape.

Except I’d ended up back there again, and it was as easy as falling through a trapdoor.

Cam’s arms clung to me like I was the only thing in the world anchoring him to the ground. His head buried into the scoop of my neck as his tears bled onto me, soaking through my thin, papery gown and seeping down my naked body underneath.

I laid there straight and unmoving, encompassed by a desperate vine. His sobs wrenched free from the depths of his broken heart, and silently sawed into me like waves stealing sand from a beach.

“She’s not ours…She’s not ours…She’s not ours.” The cracked words circled on repeat and I tried to hush Cam, only to realize the voice was my own. “We can’t see her…not ever. She’s not ours, Cam. She’s not ours to see.”

He said nothing, only squeezing my sore body harder with shaking arms. I didn’t stop him. I liked the pain. It made me feel human again. It was the only thing.

“Swear it to me…Or you’ll lose me too.” I was cruel, nothing more than a monster, threatening him with the only family he’d ever known. It scorched a black line across my being that would never fade.

But I would do that for him. Because I’d never loved anyone the way I loved him. I hadn’t even