Read Online Retribution by Jilliane Hoffman - Free Book Online Page B

new apartment in Lake Success, passing alongside any number of cars, any number of strangers, with Jamaica Hospital fading farther and farther behind them in the driving rain.

14
    Chloe told herself each morning in the mirror: Just make it through today and tomorrow will surely be better. But the tomorrows only seemed to be getting worse. The fear inside her kept growing like an uncontrollable cancer even as her wounds healed and the jagged scars began to fade. Insomnia plagued her nights; debilitating fatigue, her days.
    The managing partner at Fitz & Martinelli, the firm where she was supposed to kick-start a brilliant legal career as a medical malpractice attorney after the bar, anxiously called to see how she was and if she would be starting as scheduled in September or needed more time to recuperate. I’m fine, she had told him. Everything is healing, and I’m taking the bar as scheduled in three weeks. Thank you for your concern.
    And she believed what she said. To everyone, every day. But then, without warning, an inexplicable feeling of terror would grip her with its spindly claws, freezing her dead in her tracks – so real she could smell it. Breathing would become labored and difficult; the room would spin. On a subway ride, she would suddenly taste the cloth, feel the cold knife tip. In an elevator, she would hear his voice, smell the sweet, sickening coconut candles. In the car, she would look in her rearview and see his hideous smile. She would instantly be transported time and again back to that night. She tried to maintain some sort of schedule and just resume what was once anormal life. But as the days passed into weeks, she felt the tiny, microscopic cracks take form in her solid façade and then slowly spread and feather, until she was sure that one day she would just shatter into a million pieces.
    After two weeks of New York, her parents had finally packed up and left for Sacramento. The bravado that she had spewed at them behind a smiling poker face had worked its magic charm and they hugged and kissed her good-bye as they waited for the elevator, and begged her again to move to California.
    I’m fine. Everything is healing, and I’m taking the bar as scheduled in two weeks.
    She had waved a smiling good-bye as the elevator doors closed on her mom’s tear-streaked face. Then Chloe had turned and actually run inside her apartment, bolted the door, and just sat on the floor and cried uncontrollably for three hours.
    She continued to study for the bar exam from home. It was best not to venture out to the live lecture courses because of the many stares she knew she would receive from complete strangers, and the questions she would be asked by well-intentioned friends. Barbri, her bar review course, provided her with videotapes instead. Most days she found herself on her living room floor, surrounded by law books, notepad in hand, staring blankly at the television and watching the professors’ mouths move, but hearing them speak words that somehow made no sense anymore. She simply could not concentrate, and she knew she would not pass.
    Michael stayed over on the night before the bar exam, and then drove her at 7:00 A.M . into the Jacob Javits Center in Manhattan where the test was being administered. She signed in with the other three thousand testtakers, took her assigned seat, and received her thick multistate exam at 8:00 A .M . A hushed, concentrated silence fell over the convention center. At 8:05, Chloe looked behind her, next to her, in front of her, at the sea of unfamiliar faces, some crouched over their papers, some looking around the room in nervous desperation. They all made her feel anxious, terrified. Her head throbbed, her body quivered and broke into a cold sweat. She felt nauseated. She raised her hand and was escorted to the ladies’ room by a proctor. She stumbled into a stall and threw up. Then she splashed cold water on her face and neck, opened the bathroom door, and walked