Chapter Forty Four: Numbness

*Vivienne*

Four days had passed since the death of my mother but everything still felt like a dream.

Time and time again, I would constantly murmur to myself that it was just a bad dream. One that would go away if I would just wake up.

But when I eventually wake up the next morning, the reality of everything that has happened dawns on me.

I was now all alone in this world.

I remembered crying so hard the night that Liam found me in my apartment but after that night, I seemed to have locked up my feelings.

I went numb.

I didn't want to feel anything.

I was numb even when my mother's corpse was later found among the debris from the fire. And when I had gone to see the body in order to identify it, I was unable to form any word or reaction.

It was as if everything inside me had dried up.

I just stood there, the sight of her mutilated form etching itself into my mind, a haunting contrast to the beautiful, cheerful woman I had always known even when she was diagnosed with Alzheimer