My Champagne Problems

30: Salon

'Every mystery has to begin somewhere'

Everything leading up from the hospital to the day of the funeral is a blur.

I vaguely recall snippets of the car ride back to the mansion. Kayden sat in the back, offering nothing but a comforting hand, holding onto me as I did to him.

Wesley and Enrique, engross themselves in deep colloquy, yet succeed in doing so without so much so as an exchange of words.

Ryan stayed back at the hospital only to return much later once the sun had set. His clothes sporting the same state they had been in at the hospital. His eyes look lost, his hair dishevelled and, he was a mess, but so was I.

No one left me alone, yet they managed to not breathe down my neck. My phone won't stop buzzing from the countless calls I choose to ignore.

Staring down from my bedroom window with much impassiveness, I watch as the last of the 'relatives' offer their final condolences as they bid farewell by the front door.

"Hey." A gentle arm lays firmly yet comfortingly across my shoulders. I avert not my gaze from the window.

"It's over, you did great out there," Wesley acknowledges, yet again briefly earning my attention.

"It's going to be quite alright," he assures.

"I don't think it will," I admit solemnly. My gaze peeling away from the window, now finding focus on him.

He sighs softly unable to deny the truth behind my words. "Eventually," he says after a few moments. "You get used to it."

'I won't let myself forget it'

'Not until I know for certain the person responsible for this is held accountable'

"It's not a wise decision," Wesley snaps me out of my internal monologue. I frown, question hanging in my gaze.

"That determination you have pasted over your face, it's all too familiar," he points out.

"But sorting after vengeance has never been a good coping mechanism. Does neither party any good." I frown at his words.

"But that doesn't go to say, that in the long run, one can't learn to find solace in it," he adds darkly.

His words leave me in a cryptic haze, to say the least. Yet in a sense unperceivable to me, I understand the essence of his statements.

A knock on the door grips both of our attention. "Sir, miss, your presence is requested at the supper table," says the petite woman standing by my door dressed in what I can assume to be her uniform.

With a brisk nod, she is dismissed by Wesley. "We shouldn't keep them waiting," he says offering me a hand once he has raisin to his full length while I stay seat by the window.

"I'm not hungry," I dismiss, unmovingly.

"Well you should be, considering you haven't eaten the whole day and it's almost sundown now," he replies.

I shrug. 'Well, I'm not' I don't voice my thoughts.

He sighs at my unwillingness. "Alright then," he mumbles under his breath before reluctantly leaving the room.

Now left in a lowly loomed room with just my thoughts and eminent mystery hanging in the air, I let my mind process things.

'They know something I don't' I can't help but conclude. All this is too much of a coincidence.

My heart clenches as my mind briefly ponders over the fact that I now stand as not just a fatherless, but a motherless child as well. An orphan. My new identity. One not of choosing, yet imposed by a stranger with a motive and a gun.