As a small-town girl, I wasn’t used to all the things the Livingstone family took for granted. I was fourteen when they had taken me in, which was old enough to remember what it was like before my mother left me with them. Both my parents were very much alive, but my father wasn’t a kind man. When my mother left him, she left me with the Livingstone family.
I remember standing at their front door in the middle of the night. A brunette answered the door. “I’ve come to ask for that favor,” my mother had said, pushing me inside the house. The brunette, who I now knew to be Gweneth, had considered me carefully.
“You know I wasn’t even a good mother to my own children.”
My mom had nodded in agreement. “Yes, but Liam was always a good father.”
Gweneth had certainly been speaking the truth, that much I knew now. She was the best friend I could have asked for, but she was a terrible mother figure. Constantly pulling me into her messes, making me cover for her when she was cheating on Liam or offering me all the wrong advice. She showered me in expensive gifts and never had me do anything myself. It didn’t surprise me her own daughter didn’t even know what a dishwasher looked like.
Why a man such as Liam had married her, had been the biggest question mark in my life. Whenever I asked anyone about it, they always made the same joke. “Well, that’s what you get for making a deal with the devil.” I didn’t get it.
Although I no longer had a mother figure in my life, I did for the first time have a father figure, most of the time anyway. Liam was the most caring man I had met in my life, but whenever I stepped outside the mansion, he would treat me like a stranger. We never went anywhere together, at school they had used my real last name, unconcerned my father would find me. Whenever my parents had to show up at school, they hired the same pair of actors to come around. Of course, I thought it was weird, but I had trusted Liam when he had told me: “It’s the only way to keep you really safe.”
Every last Friday of the month I went into town to buy a new set of books, always at the same bookstore. It was rather uneventful. In the morning I was dropped off, I would get two hours to look around and choose eight books, then I would be picked up again and driven home.
Today was that day. Sometimes picking new books was easy because there weren’t many new books. I already had picked five when I noticed someone staring at me from the corner of my eye. Had I seen that person before? Yes, I had, I just can’t remember when. I look again, to see the man has turned away from me, pretending to read a book. Up-side-down. I walk over to the man, putting using my right hand to lower his book.
“It’s much more believable when are holding the book correctly,” I say.
He laughs nervously. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“This is the third month you’re here, staring at me as I pick out my books,” I say. I can see in his eyes that I’m partly right, so he’s probably been keeping an eye on me for longer than three months. “Who are you, mystery man?”
“I’m William.” He replies. “And I’m supposed to make you an offer.”
I smile at him. Does this guy think we are in the movie? “Let me guess, an offer I can’t refuse.”
“Something like that. How would you like to live with your mother again?” When he says those words, everything around me goes silent. How long exactly has this person been watching me that he knows about my mother?
“What do you want in return?” I ask. William lets out a shaky breath, as if he was afraid, he would not make it to this part of the conversation. He seems confident yes, but there’s also something else, a streak of fear across his determined face.
“Anything incriminating you can find on Liam Livingstone.”
