It turned out that he’d been the one breaking into my house, too, looking through things to find a thumb drive that had a recipe for a new type of LSD that Effie had stolen from him. Duke had bitten him on one occasion – the time when I’d found blood on him but couldn’t find any wounds – and after that he’d taken to locking him in the kitchen. That would be horrifying if it wasn’t for the fact that he’d bragged to DB and Garrett about having a protective body suit that he’d used after the bite because he wasn’t “a fucking idiot” - something which evidence proved he actually was. Apparently, he broke in wearing it with a t-shirt of mine tied around his wrist confuse him, and would then push him through to the kitchen, locking him in.
The whole case had left me with anxiety and I had PTSD nightmares from the assault, too. It had taken a year of therapy to help me learn to live with the PTSD, but the case had made the nightmares come back, and the anxiety that followed them was almost crippling until I was prescribed Paxil and given a prescription for Xanax if I needed to take it. So far I hadn’t, but it helped to know it was there if it became too much.
My inability to organize my things in a way that appeased my OCD at a time when I needed that order and control the most had also fueled part of my anxiety. I’d shuffled things around, tried different tactics for the order I put them in, shuffled again, taken shit out of all of my shelves and moved it around, but none of it had been right. One night, after a particularly bad day, Jarrod had told me he’d fix it and to trust him to do it right. The next day I’d come home to Isla and Luke’s twins working away in the living room, and immediately what they’d done soothed the rough edges inside me. The order wasn’t something I would have thought of, but it was perfect.
They’d enjoyed it so much that they’d continued to come over with their parents and had organized my bedroom, Elodie’s bedroom (who we still had for a week every three weeks), and the rest of the house. Through this, we became close to Luke and Isla, and I owed their twins a huge debt of gratitude. On the flip side of this, Isla said they owed me a huge debt of gratitude because the twins loved doing it and had calmed down, which was hilarious. But my anxiety became more controllable thanks to what they’d done, and that meant I hadn’t had to take the Xanax for it – something which meant a huge deal to me. Then Jarrod had moved in and the twins had begged to come back to help merge our belongings together, so even that had been a relatively stress less event.
The other big change for my family was that Effie had turned up at my parent's house the day of Maude’s funeral looking broken and devastated. She’d told the family that she was going to get help and had apologized to all of us for what had happened. Unfortunately, even for Leo and Neo, it was too little too late. It wasn’t just that we’d lost Maude months earlier than we were going to, it was so much more than that. As if the death of an amazing woman wasn’t enough, she’d taunted Shane with the fact she’d hidden the drive in something we had and he’d never get it back, and she’d put her daughter in danger, an innocent one-year-old who’d had the fortune of having a family who’d loved her when her mother hadn’t. Apparently she’d gone to rehab and was back at school studying for something, but I had no interest in what she was studying for or what she was doing anymore.
Last month, on the day that Perkins had finally, fucking finally, been sentenced, Jarrod had given me an envelope with printouts of our tickets to Jamaica. Ren had given us both eight weeks off, so we flew into Kingston, stayed a week, traveled to a place called Discovery Bay, went to Negril, traveled to Montego Bay but only stayed two days because of the tourists, then we’d driven to Ocho Rios staying outside it in a rented house for three days, and had then driven back to Kingston via Fern Gully. Last night we’d been up at a place called Strawberry Hill, and in a couple days we were going to the Blue Mountains for three days. After that we had a list of places we still wanted to go to, and we had the time and a car so we were going to try to see as many of them as we could.