If I can just keep Lauren and her emotions under wraps a bit longer, and keep Dean and his obsessive ways at bay, I will be free.
No more locked rooms, dinners that are far from edible, or by-the-clock pills to take. I can almost taste it. If you could see my smile right now, Lauren, you would know how badly you have lost this game.
Save the energy, the nerves, and the effort.
There was a time when you wanted to be me. Wish granted.
Have you not heard the term, be careful what you wish for?
Sarah
The nurse trembled at the shiver of fear that coursed through her. Sarah was beyond the point of being just one voice trapped within a body shared by two. She was blatantly taunting Lauren. Do not stand in the way of my freedom, she was saying. You have lost, so give up now. You have no one to blame but yourself. After all, it was you who wanted to be me, isn’t that right?
The nurse’s mind flitted to her most recent vision of Lauren, how she had looked and what hell she must have gone through in order to get there.
I am sorry, the nurse thought to herself. I am so sorry there was a time I did not believe you, a time when I ignored your tears at night. I wish I could have helped you.
Was there a way to help Lauren, really? Was there truly anything that any well-trained, well-educated aide, psychologist, or psychiatrist could have done to stop the rapid escalation of Sarah’s power over her?
The next entry made the nurse smile because it was signed by Lauren, and dated only two days later. Hope sparked to life in her heart at the sight of the pretty scrawl she had come to recognize. Sarah might’ve been trying hard to snuff her out, but Lauren was not gone yet. She was a fighter, and the nurse silently congratulated her for making it this far.
February 18, 2015
She is making it harder and harder for me to make it back to the forefront of my mind. I wish I knew how I managed to let her get so strong so quickly. Perhaps if I knew the cause, I could undo it. Unfortunately, there is not much time now.
Sarah has taken it all from me, everything. She has left me with only guilt and despair. Because I allowed her to help me, I have lost Michael in the most brutal way, and Michael lost his life.
I will forever despise myself and her for Michael’s loss. It is, after all, his loss that I mourn, not my own. If I could go back, I would fix everything Michael lost. I made this mess, created it with my own warped mind, and Michael is the one who paid the ultimate price for it.
That does not seem to be enough for Sarah.
Now, she yearns to take Dean and strip him of everything that is beautiful about him as well. I cringe just thinking of how she leads him on, treats him as though he is not worthy, uses him in ways that I cannot even imagine and allows him to believe it is me who would treat him that way.
When he is here and I can make it past Sarah to talk to him, to hold his hands gently in my own, those are the times with him that I cherish most, and I will take those moments with me to my grave.
I do hope he knows how much I have grown to respect him and to even love him in my own way. He has stuck by me during a time when he had every right to never want to see me again.
Dean’s thoughtfulness and generosity is the reason that I despise Sarah’s vindictiveness so much. Mostly, I hate myself for allowing something so good and something so bad to collide. Nothing good can come of it.
Thus, I must make it right. For him. For me. For Michael.
The nurse swallowed the lump slowly forming in her throat. Never would she have believed that such an inner battle had been raging within Lauren. She had seen her every day, even helped to deliver her meals and administer her medications.
The thought came to her suddenly that there were no medications to date that could be prescribed to ease or cure an illness like dissociative identity disorder. Lauren’s medications were only to calm her down, not help her get away from the strength of Sarah’s hold.
For a moment, the nurse wondered if Lauren knew she would never be able to free herself from Sarah. It only took another fraction of a second for her to realize Lauren had understood this far too well. Perhaps things would have been different had there been some sort of refuge from Sarah’s grasp, but as it stood from the words on the pages in front of her, the nurse could not see how that would be possible.
She flipped through a few of the pages that followed Lauren’s entry, but they remained blank, the blue lines of each page standing out against the bright white of the background. Lauren and Sarah had kept their battle within their minds.
Maybe the answers were not meant to be known by me or anyone else after all.
Sadness swept over her at the thought of never knowing how it all truly ended. In a sense, she did know, but that last journal entry did not seem like an ending. It was unfinished somehow.
She tossed the book onto the bed and got up, her back aching slightly from the bent-forward posture she had maintained for the past hour or so. She took a few steps around the room, once again wondering idly what Lauren, the real Lauren, must have thought while she did the same. Her words in the journal held only regret and despair at what had ultimately become of her, Michael, and Dean. They all had different endings to their story, but none of those endings would ever be happy.
The nurse looked up at the clock that ticked loudly on the wall. Her shift had been over for more than thirty minutes. With a sigh, she made the decision to give up trying to pack away Lauren’s belongings for today. Besides, she would be back for the morning shift tomorrow, and the odds of anyone coming in here were slim.
She took one last look at the red journal lying on the bed and turned to head for the door. As she reached for it and gripped the edge of it to swing it open, she caught sight of the calendar hanging crookedly on the wall beneath the clock. She glanced at the little block signifying yesterday’s date and saw Lauren’s writing within it. The words stared back at her with such overwhelming power they could have been written in blood.
To Michael, With Love Always, Lauren
The words said so little and yet so much at the exact same time.
The nurse blinked again, and read the words as though making sure that they were truly there. Then she whirled around and dove for the journal, flipping the pages frantically to see if she was right.
She had to be.
She scanned the dates across the top of each page to find what she was looking for. She stopped, holding her breath as her gaze fixed on the date.
She was right. On the page in front of her, just below yesterday’s date, were the same words scrawled on the calendar.
To Michael, With Love Always, Lauren
She began to read the paragraph below the dedication.
February 27, 2015
To Michael, With Love Always, Lauren
Today is the day I shall make it right.
I was beginning to fear I would not have my chance to be myself one last time. Thankfully, I woke up early this morning and was able to muster up what little strength I had left to push Sarah back in the deepest part of the mind we share.
Today is my last chance to be me, and I hope I can use that time to right at least some of the wrongs I have created. It is because of the wrongs I cannot right that I am saying my goodbyes today. I do hope my reasoning is not clouded by the act itself, or I shall have truly made my final choice in vain.
To the staff at West Heights that have put up with Sarah and I, please do not think that your efforts to be nice, tolerable, and helpful have not gone unnoticed. I saw through many of the attempts to hide the fact that most of you did not believe I was living with someone else inside me. Even as I write this, it feels like someone else’s story.
If it had been someone else going through what I have gone through, I am not sure I would have believed them myself. Therefore, I do not blame you. All I can do is thank you from the bottom of my heart for at least trying to ease the emotional upheaval I have lived through in the past year. Thank you for tha
t. Lastly, please know that nothing I do today is your fault. I cannot be helped. I cannot be cured. No one can save me, so I must save myself the only way I know how.
To Libby, I do not hate you for what you did. Please know that. While I have not seen you since that fateful day a year ago, please know that I have thought of you often and have wondered what became of you.
As much as it hurts me to say it, it seems you and I both loved Michael in our own way, and so I suppose you do know the kind of pain I am going through, as you have lost him as well. It may be surprising and even twisted of me to say it, but I am sorry for the pain you have had to feel in that regard.
To Dean, I hope you can someday forgive me for my actions and my choices. You and I have gone through things most people shall hopefully never have to endure. In the end, however, the tragedy that has become our life together has made me grow to love you in a way that I cannot explain.
You have loved me through the times you should have just walked away, and your love for me has led you to the darkest corners life could have put you in. Prison, Dean. You went to prison because of me. You should hate me, despise me, and vow to never lay your soulful eyes on me again.
Yet, you come here. Day after day, you show up to bring the tiniest ray of sunshine into my generic-looking, four-walled prison cell. You will never know how much those short, quiet visits with you have meant to me. Although I have done you wrong in so many ways, Dean, not a day goes by that I do not thank the heavens above for the little window of time I got to share with you. It was unexpected, but you have made what should have been hell become something bearable. Forever, I will love you for that.
To Michael, my true love, my husband. If I had a penny for every time I asked myself how things between us got the way they were, I would have suffocated within this room because it would be filled to the brim. I shall never truly forgive myself for straying from you and for being someone you felt you needed to stray from.
I blame you for nothing, Michael. None of it. It was my selfishness and the consequences of my greedy actions that ended your life. To say that I am sorry for what happened to you is not enough. It will never be enough. It was me that did this to you, Michael, and for that I have to reap some kind of punishment. There must be consequences to my actions. My unfaithfulness was just the beginning, and if being confined to an inner hell with Sarah is my punishment for it, I have allowed it to go on for a year.
That said, I do hope you can forgive me, not only for everything I did that caused your death, but also for the fact that I cannot allow my punishment of residing with Sarah to go on any longer. If it were meant to be my punishment and my punishment alone, that would be a different story.
However, Dean is the only one able to hopefully walk away from this and lead a full life, but Sarah has no intentions of permitting such a thing. Michael, she is going to ruin him, destroy him from the inside out. Please, if you can, please forgive me for my last attempt to do something good, to save Dean from the emotional and mental catastrophe that is Sarah. I do hope that you can, Michael. I will see you soon, my love.
Finally, to Sarah. You deserve no words dedicated to you in this letter, and if I succeed, you shall never read them anyway. Therefore, I will leave you with only one thought, the one thing that allows me to smile in even the faintest manner as I write the words:
You did not win.
Goodbye,
Lauren Carrington
The nurse stared at the page, convinced she could hear the emptiness and despair in Lauren’s voice. In the end, all that mattered to Lauren was that Dean lived the life he deserved. She wanted her husband’s forgiveness, and she didn’t want Sarah to have the last word.
A life full of ups and downs, happiness and heartache, mistakes and battles, all summed up in a few tiny paragraphs on a page of a book that had been hidden away in the back of a nightstand in a psychiatric facility.
A flood of sadness overwhelmed the nurse at the thought of it. So much unhappiness and tragedy in one story, she could hardly take it. Even if she had believed what little Lauren had told the staff and the media, the nurse never would have expected such a formidable tale of fear and deceit.
With nothing left to do but leave, she closed the book.
That can’t be all there is to it.
There had to be something else, anything else that would somehow make all the deception and sadness worth the pain. It could not possibly just be over, just like that.
Maybe it was intuition, but the nurse knew there was something she was missing, and it was crucial. With nothing else to go on, she thumbed through the remaining blank pages of the journal. She saw it almost immediately, and it was as if she had known where it was all along.
A small picture was drawn in pencil in the corner of one of the last few pages, shaded so lightly that it could have easily been overlooked had she not felt the pull of it inside her. She stared at the image, her forehead crinkling as she tried to comprehend why Lauren would draw a picture of a bed.
No headboard, just folded down sheets with a square pillow at the head of it. There was nothing special about it except for the area near the head of it where she had pressed harder on the pencil as she drew it. A solid line was all it was.
It meant everything to the nurse, however.
She let the journal fall from her hands as she threw herself to her knees and began to rip the fitted sheet away from the mattress. When she lifted the mattress and shoved her hands under it, she found the cardboard cover of a three-ringed notebook. It had been placed in the exact location of the darkly-shaded area on the illustration. She could feel it in her bones. This was what she had been looking for when she had walked into the room earlier.
There was nothing written on the front cover to explain what the contents might be. When she opened the cover, everything she needed to know was there in that familiar artsy writing.
It seemed everything Lauren had done yesterday, her last day on earth, the last day she would need to share her innermost feelings and regrets with Sarah, had been of its own significance to her. The notebook contained the second novel Lauren had been working on so tirelessly. It was the novel that created the mess she had come to live in, and it was now the novel that would be the ending of that mess as well.
Inside the front cover was the inscription that explained everything.
She had to admit, she had been shocked to find out that morning that Lauren had committed suicide using an overdose of the anxiety medications that she had been administered each day. She had hoarded them in the drawer of her nightstand, using the all-too-common trick of sticking it under her tongue when the West Heights staff were of the belief that she had, in fact, swallowed the pill.
Her care worker had found her when she entered the room earlier that morning to make sure Lauren was getting ready for her talk therapy group session. There was still hushed chatter amongst the staff about it, though. It was not the fact that she had chosen to kill herself that got to everyone the way it had. It was that she had laid there on top of the covers on her bed, the drawer of her nightstand still open, with a look that could have been mistaken for a peaceful sleep had it not been for the grateful smile on her lips.
The staff who had seen her said they were not likely to forget the sight. Now, the nurse knew the reasoning behind that smile. She read the inscription again, and knew Lauren had finally gotten the ending she wanted.
For my Michael, forever in my heart. The days we shared together brought us here, and the final day we now share shall hopefully bring us back to where we ought to be. Together. This is for you, the love I lost on February 27, 2014.
Their deaths were one year apart to the day.
She chose that day in remembrance of Michael. Tears stung the nurse’s eyes again.
What that kind of love must be like. She wondered then if Lauren had found Michael, wherever she was now. She wondered if she’d finally escaped the grip of Sarah’s brutality. Would Dean be okay, and did
he know what Lauren had done?
The nurse wondered if she would ever stop contemplating this.
She didn’t think she would. Maybe she couldn’t.
Either way, Lauren’s love would live on in her written words and the impact she had made on the nurse. There were two things she was sure of now. Firstly, she would do all she could to do right by Lauren and the written legacy she’d left behind. Lastly, February twenty-seventh would never be just another day on the calendar, meaningless and uneventful. Instead, the date would remain etched in her mind as the day love conquered hate, good defeated evil, and strength overpowered weakness.
You won, the nurse vowed silently, the bittersweet finality of her thoughts bringing her to tears.
You won.
Acknowledgments
To my Mom and Dad: Once again, you’ve been so supportive. There’s no way I could do this without you. I hope you know how much you guys mean to me!
To Dennis: Thank you for putting up with this rollercoaster of a journey we’re on! You’ve let me drag you along for the ride. For that, I love you.
To my Grandma: Thank you so much for the enthusiasm and optimism you’ve shown during this endeavor. Our telephone chats, no matter what the topic, are moments I will cherish forever. I love you, Gramma!
So many people have gone above and beyond to get the word out about my books. I know I’m going to forget someone, but I’m going to try to thank a few of you anyway. Thank you to Kelly R., Rita, Hally, Jody, Maryse, Tracy, Erica, Rosa, everyone who has sent emails and messages asking about my books, and everyone who has spent their hard-earned dollars to buy the books I’ve written. There are no words to express how grateful I am.
About the Author
M. Lynne Cunning has always wanted to be an author, but it wasn’t until she discovered National Novel Writing Month and all the insanity that goes along with it that she began to truly realize her love for writing stories. While she doesn’t limit herself to writing only specific genres, her first published novel is a New Adult/Romance. She also doesn’t believe that the traditional typical “happily ever after” is always the way to go. You’ve been forewarned.
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