White Space Season 2

greater good. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’d like to finish my jog. Alone.”
    Father turned from his son and ran down the path, leaving Warren to turn and head home, knowing with a sickening certainty that his choices were none.

    **

    Melinda woke in her hospital room one week later and opened her eyes to Warren.
    Melinda had been told that she slipped and fell hard in the kitchen, banging her head right into a hospital stay — the same story given to everyone else.
    The doctor, who had already spoken to Melinda the day before, said she didn’t remember the men coming to take her away. She also didn’t remember the video she’d seen which made the mild operation a major success.
    This was the first time Warren had seen Melinda since she surfaced from her medically induced coma. She smiled when she saw him, but there was something off in the smile, just as there was something off in her eyes.
    It was Melinda, but as they spoke, Warren felt something missing — the fire that burned inside her and made Melinda his wife was now dim. It was as if they’d taken molecules of her personality and spun them to nothing, alongside her memories of the video and subsequent argument.
    “What’s wrong?” she asked sweetly, noticing Warren’s concern.
    “Nothing,” he lied, suddenly realizing that it hadn’t been his sacrifice — it was Melinda’s, and she was never given a choice.

    * * * *

CHAPTER 1 — Cassidy Hughes

    Cassidy opened her eyes in the frigid, dark room, her head pounding and thoughts fuzzy, memory an amnesiac’s diarrhea. She looked around the dingy studio apartment and its embarrassment of mess. Beside her, the queen-sized bed was empty. From the bathroom, rain pounded the shower floor. On the nightstand a crooked row of empty beer bottles circled her painkillers’ upturned cap, no pill bottle beside it.
    She panicked — where are they?
    Cassidy leaned over the bed, looked down at the carpet, and saw the bottle on the floor. She grabbed it. Empty!
    Cass dropped to the floor, still naked, then crawled on all fours, combing her fingers through shag, reaching under the nightstand and bed, praying to find at least one, hopefully two to rid her pounding bitch of a headache.
    Cassidy’s hand brushed a line of junk under the bed — clothes, boxes, tissues, and God knew what else — until her fingers finally found a tiny pill. She grabbed it, careful not to lose it in the carpet, studied it in the dim light seeping through a thin crack in the blanket draping the windows, to make sure it was, in fact, the right pill, then popped it in her mouth. Dizzy, she looked at the bottles of beer on the nightstand, found one with a swallow left at the bottom, and washed the pill down her throat with the slightly cool beer.
    She was back on the floor searching for pills when Craig’s voice wrinkled the air from behind her, coming from the bathroom.
    “Whatcha doin’?” he asked, playfully, stepping out of the bathroom, naked and drying his hair.
    Cassidy looked up at Craig, who looked smug, smiling like Cheshire Cat.
    “Nothing, just looking for pills; the bottle’s empty,” she said, searching for her clothes. Too much nudity in the room. What felt so right in the previous evening’s momentary heat felt wrong in a new day’s judgmental light. It felt like the horrible mistake it was.
    Cassidy retrieved her Shipwrecked tee from the floor and slid the black fabric over her body, followed by her panties and pants.
    “Relax,” Craig said, scraping a thin towel over his long, shaggy hair as she dressed. He finished drying his mop then tossed the towel onto the bathroom floor and went to his dresser. He opened the top drawer, pulled out a large white plastic bottle that looked like it could help weather any storm with a thousand-pill harbor, and said, “How many you need?”
    Cassidy swallowed, hating the question almost as much as the man it came from.
    “I dunno,” she said, not wanting to seem needy like she felt, but also not wanting to ask for too few, knowing she would only wind back up at Craig’s in the middle of the night again in a couple of days, desperate. “Fifty?”
    “OK,” he said, “Gimme your bottle.”
    She grabbed the bottle, along with the lid, and went to Craig. She handed it over, hands shaking. He met her eyes, smiling. “Don’t worry, no charge this time.”
    “Why?” she asked. “I have money.”
    “Consider it payment for services rendered,” he said, wearing