LITMIR.BIZ

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like Ramirez’s voice, pointing out how she was making matters worse. You left the city and retreated into the woods. Rather than face the pain and a life that had been upended, you ran away and spent a few days drinking yourself into oblivion. So what will you do now? Run away again? Or should you maybe fix it?

      Back inside the cabin, though, she felt safer than she had while standing on Rose’s doorstep. It seemed to lessen the sting of having her daughter slam a door on her. Yes, it made her feel like a coward but she simply didn’t know how else to deal with it.

      She’s right, Avery thought. I am toxic to her. Over the last few years, I’ve done nothing but make her life so much more difficult. It started when I put my career over her father and then just got worse when, no matter how hard I tried, the career won out over her, too. And here we are again, at odds even when the career is gone.

      And it’s because she blames me for her father’s murder.

      And she’s not exactly wrong about that.

      She walked slowly over to the bed that she had yet to fully put together. Her personal safe was there, sitting among the headboard and the box springs. As she opened it, she thought of entering Jack’s living room and finding his body. She thought of Ramirez in the hospital, already seriously injured before he had been killed.

      Her hands were dirty in all of that. And she’d never be able to clean them.

      She reached into the safe and pulled out her Glock. It felt familiar in her hands, like an old friend.

      The tears still came as she rested her back against the headboard. She looked to the gun, studying it. It or one just like it had been on her hip or at her back for nearly two decades, closer to her than any human had ever been. So it felt all too natural when she placed it to the soft flesh beneath her chin. Its touch was cold but assertive.

      She let out a sob as she positioned it back at an angle, making sure the bullet would pass through at the best angle. Her finger found the trigger and trembled against it.

      She wondered if she’d even hear the blast before she was gone and, if she did, if it would sound as loud as Rose slamming the door behind her.

      Her finger curled around the trigger and she closed her eyes.

      The doorbell rang, making her jump.

      Her finger loosened and her entire body went limp. The Glock clattered to the floor.

      Almost, she thought as her heart slammed mounds of adrenaline into her bloodstream. Another quarter of a second and my brains would be all over the wall.

      She looked down at the Glock and swatted it away as if it were a poisonous snake. She buried her head in her hands and wiped the tears away.

      You almost killed yourself, the voice that may or may not have been Ramirez said. Doesn’t that make you feel like a coward?

      She pushed the thought away as she got to her feet and made her way to the front door. She had no idea who it could be. She dared to hope that it was Rose but she knew that would not be the case. Rose was very much like her mother in that regard – stubborn to a fault.

      She opened the door and found no one. She did, however, see the rear of a UPS truck leaving her driveway. She looked down to the porch and saw a small box. She picked it up and read her own name and new address in very neat handwriting. The sender’s address showed no name, just a New York address.

      She took it inside and opened it slowly. There was no weight to the box and when she opened it, she found balled up newspaper. She removed it all and found just one single thing waiting for her at the bottom.

      It was a single sheet of paper, folded in half. She unfolded it, and when she read the message inside, her heart stopped for a moment.

      And just like that, Avery no longer felt the need to kill herself.

      She read the message over and over, trying to make sense of it. Her mind worked it over, seeking an answer. And with something like this to figure out, the mere thought of dying before it was solved was out of the question.

      She sat on the couch and stared at it, reading it again and again.

       who are you, avery?

      Yours,

      Howard

      CHAPTER THREE

      In the coming days, Avery kept touching the area beneath her chin where she had placed the barrel of the gun. It felt irritated, like a bug bite. Whenever she lay down for sleep and her neck extended when her head hit the pillow, that area felt exposed and vulnerable.

      She was going to have to face the fact that she had gone to a very dark place. Even though she had ultimately been pulled away from it, she had gone there. It would forever be a smear on her memories and it seemed that even the very nerves within her flesh wanted to make sure she did not forget it.

      For the three days following her near-suicide, she was more depressed than she had ever been in her life. She spent those days curled on her couch. She tried to read but couldn’t focus. She tried motivating herself to go for a run but felt too tired. She kept looking to Howard’s letter, handling it so much that the paper was starting to wrinkle.

      She stopped her heavy drinking after receiving the letter from Howard. Slowly, like a caterpillar, she started to break out of her cocoon of self-pity. She slowly started to exercise. She also did crossword puzzles and Sudoku just to keep her mind sharp. Without work, and knowing she had enough money to last her a year without having to worry about anything, it was very easy to fall into a mindset of laziness.

      But Howard’s package had erased that lethargy from her. She now had a mystery to solve which set her to a task. And when Avery Black was set to a task, there was no end until it was resolved.

      Within a week after receiving the letter, her days slipped into something of a routine. It was still the routine of a hermit, but the routine of it alone made her feel normal. It made her feel like there might be something worth living for. Structure. Mental challenges. Those were the things that had always inspired her and they did that in those coming weeks.

      Her mornings started at seven. She’d go out running right away, etching out a brisk two-mile run through the back roads around the cabin for that first week. She’d return home, eat breakfast, and go over old case files. She had more than one hundred in her own personal records, all of which had been solved. But she went over them just to keep herself busy and to remind herself that among the failures that had occurred there near the end, she’d also enjoyed more than a few successes.

      She’d then spend an hour unpacking and organizing. She followed this with lunch and either a crossword or a puzzle of some kind. She then did a simple exercise circuit in the bedroom – just a quick session of crunches, sit-ups, planks, and other core exercises. She would then spend a bit of time looking at the files from her last case – the case that had ended up taking the lives of Jack and Ramirez. Some days she’d look at them for ten minutes, other days she’d stare at them for two hours.

      What went wrong? What had she missed earlier on? Would she have survived the case had it not been for Howard Randall’s behind-the-scenes interference?

      Then came dinner, a bit of reading, some more cleaning, and then bed. It was an eventless routine, but it was a routine all the same.

      It took two months to get the cabin clean and in order. By that time, her two-mile run had evolved into a five-mile run. She no longer looked over the old files or the contents from the last one. Instead, she had taken to reading books she bought on Amazon featuring real-life crime dramas and nonfiction police procedurals. She’d also mixed in some books pertaining to the psychological evaluations of some of history’s most noted serial killers.

      She was only partly aware that this was her way of filling the void her work had once filled. As this dawned on her more and more, she couldn’t help but wonder about what her future looked like.

      One morning, while she made her run around Walden Pond, the cold burning her lungs in a way that was more pleasant than unbearable, this

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