Total pages in book: 117
Estimated words: 108342 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 542(@200wpm)___ 433(@250wpm)___ 361(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 108342 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 542(@200wpm)___ 433(@250wpm)___ 361(@300wpm)
“Talk to me.” He handed her a tissue.
“This morning, I got some bad news.” Another tear fell, and she quickly dabbed it away with the Kleenex. “I got a call while I was out on a site with a company, talking to a client. The call was about a lady I know. My friend. Someone I graduated with from the police academy. Yashi.” She smiled sadly and looked down into her hands, fidgeting with the scrunched tissue. “Yashi was beautiful… she was smart, silly, and strong…” She sniffed, and her lips curled slightly upwards as she spoke so fondly of this woman. “On the outside, you’d think she and I would have little in common—me being this tall Black woman, and her being a short woman who had been born in Bangalore, India, but lived most of her life in Boston once her parents immigrated there.
“Despite our different upbringings and cultural differences, she and I had become real good friends. We had a lot in common. It was an instantaneous connection. You didn’t see her without me, and that’s just how it was. We would help each other in this male-dominated career, and we had a lot of fun together, too. She got married to some guy she met a few years after we graduated and secured jobs. Her parents couldn’t stand him, and neither could I.”
“Why?”
“I saw her change not long after they got together. She became less sure of herself. Shrunk down to make him feel less threatened. She was now codependent on him. His opinion of her meant everything. He complained about her hair. Her makeup. The way she spoke. He bullied her. Made her feel so small…” Her voice faded at the end as her gaze seemed to land on nothing in particular. “He tried to keep us apart by not telling her when I called or stopped by until, finally, her calls to me stopped altogether. He’d completely isolated her. He was a womanizer and emotionally abusive, Nikolai. A horrible person.”
“Did the two of you eventually reconnect?”
“Yes. About a year ago. Suddenly, I’d get a call or text from her out of the blue. It was never consistent, but it was a start. I was so happy to speak to her again. I didn’t care that days, sometimes weeks passed before she’d reach out to me again. Initially, she pretended everything was going great. As time passed, she opened up more. She quit the force and was isolated in their house. Her dream of being an officer had been stripped from her.”
“He talked her into quitting, or gave an ultimatum?”
“Both. He’d been complaining that her hours were unpredictable, and he didn’t want her out and about dealing with dangerous criminals. She got pregnant, but miscarried. He blamed her for that. She told me what he’d been doing, and I’d tell her to file for divorce, but she wouldn’t leave him alone. No matter how miserable he made her, she just didn’t have the self-worth to cut him loose.”
She looked down into the cup he’d given her, took a sip of her coffee, and with a shaky hand, set it down on a display table full of miniature metal art shaped like suns, stars, and moons.
“Then what happened?”
“Well, seems he decided to cut her loose. He moved out of their house. Left her for someone else. I initially tried to be comforting and supportive, but all she wanted to talk about was repairing her marriage.” She shook her head. “She even told me that I gave up on my own marriage far too soon, so I probably wasn’t the best person to be giving such advice. I was pissed that she tried to make it personal, swing it back my way, but I bit my tongue. She was hurting and lashing out because I wasn’t telling her what she wanted to hear. We didn’t speak for a few days. Then, she called me a couple of weeks ago, starting up again about how she was going to insist they go to marriage counseling again, and that she was driving past the woman’s house he was staying with and honking her horn. I lost it. I couldn’t believe this was who she’d become. I went completely off.”
He watched her chest rise and fall, faster than normal. The tears got even more intense. Her complexion deepened along the apples of her cheeks and nose, and her eyes remained misty with a light pink hue. “I told her that she was better than this! I was hard on her, Nik!” She bent over at the waist, sobbing her eyes out while she bunched the fabric of her light gray pants, roughing it up around her knees. “I told her I was disappointed in how weak she’d become because she called me to ask me how to get his ass back, on top of everything else. It was like he had some sort of power over her… a wicked hold. I became incensed! I couldn’t believe that this was the same Yashi who’d become one of my best friends. Where was her confidence? Her self-esteem?