But then she blinked.
What was she—
She looked down in horror at her hands.
Her hands that were around another person’s throat.
Choking the life out of her.
Isobel let go of Catrina and stumbled backwards.
Catrina fell to the floor, hoarsely gasping in huge gulps of air between coughing fits.
Holy Jesus, what had she just done?
Isobel looked at her hands in disbelief. Had she really almost just… Oh God. Oh God oh God oh God.
“They’ll put you away for this,” Catrina gasped, still clutching her throat.
Isobel turned and ran out of the kitchen.
Run.
She had to get out of here.
Run.
Right now.
Catrina would call the police any minute. They’ll put you away. Catrina hated her. And Isobel had just given her stepmother the perfect opportunity to get rid of her for good.
An attempted murder charge.
Isobel felt sick as she fled upstairs to get her purse and car keys.
She was about to pick up her phone to toss it in her purse when she stopped at the last second. It was easy for people to track phones, right?
Shit, was she really thinking like that? Like a fugitive?
She looked toward the ceiling. How had everything gotten fucked sideways so quickly? She shook her head and took a quick breath in, trying to steady herself. There was no time. No time for thinking. No time for anything.
She jammed some clothes and shoes in a bag, grabbed her keys, and was almost out her door when she stopped.
“Shit.”
She turned around and ran back into the bathroom. She’d almost forgotten her anti-depressants. She grabbed the pill bottle from the medicine cabinet. Had she even taken them today? With as fucked up as her moods had been lately, the last thing she needed was to be screwing with her medication.
She unscrewed the lid and poured one of the small pills into her hand. Not that it was helping much. She’d been so stable for years and then for it to all go down the shitter so drastically—
She reached for a glass of water and as she did, she knocked the bottle of pills over, spilling them out on the counter.
“Fuck!” She did not have time for this. Had Catrina already called the cops?
But as she started scooping the little pills back into the bottle, she paused. Some of them didn’t look right.
A bunch of the tablets had a little line down the middle where you could split them in half if you needed to. But about half of them didn’t have the line.
“What the hell?”