A Fire That Burns (8 page)

Chapter Fifteen

THE
sinking feeling in
her never died and life resumed as Austin had expected it to. She had barely
seen anything of Tyler like she had thought, but it didn’t stop her from going
out of her mind. It meant she didn’t get to see Tyler revel in the grief and
she didn’t have to feel her heart breaking at the thought of him having
Natasha’s potential offspring.

She stilled in her actions of cleaning the window, he had lost the baby.
Natasha wasn’t pregnant anymore. She had lost the baby. Austin guessed it was
down to not wanting to sympathize with Natasha on any level, but as she now
made the connotation, it was all she could think about. Natasha and
her
were now more alike than ever. They were on an emotional
level that they could relate on. A little sniggering from within broke her away
from that empathetic track and made her understand that her and Natasha would
never relate, not when they both wanted the same thing – Tyler.

“Aussie, it’s your week to do the grocery shopping,” she heard Tom call
up and she was thankful for a new task, one that drove her away from the house.
“I don’t mind going, but we had a deal
. ”

“No it’s fine. It is my turn. I’ll go now,” Austin shouted down to him
and didn’t want to waste time; she wanted to run away from her thought
processes. “Anything you need?”

“Nothing other than the usual,” he called out and went back out to the
garden to finish the patio.

Austin threw the rag down and decided she wanted to go shopping and then
do nothing but relax for the rest of the evening. Window cleaning, hanging
curtains, fixing odds and ends could wait until another day.

“I’ll meet you at home okay? I won’t be long,” she called out to her
brother who stuck his thumb up as he concentrated and then left to begin the
short journey.

Austin walked into the store and immediately felt like all eyes were on
her and the lips of the gossipers didn’t halt at all as she walked the aisles.

“I can’t believe she can even show her face after what she did.” She
heard two of her and Natasha’s moms’ friends gossiping.

“I know right? It’s disgraceful that she’s even sticking in town,”
Austin sped up as that bit was voiced and she felt victimized and belittled in
the grocery store.

She kept her head down looking at the list and instinctively grabbed
things and put them in the cart, she looked up as she noticed someone in the
aisle and was stopped immediately from carrying on.

“I think
it’s
best you leave,” Stephen, the
store manager, who she had gone to school with, said as he stepped in front of
her fully. His face was dark and accusatory and he wasn’t going to take any
victims.

Austin looked at him, her hands gripping the cart, “Excuse me?” she
asked as she looked over her shoulder in despair, “What have I done?” She
looked down at the cart to see if anything was in there that really shouldn’t
have been, but all she saw were the few groceries she had just picked up.

“Oh, you know what you’ve done and we don’t serve
murderers
in
this place,” he told her and put his hands on the opposite ends of the cart. He
watched the shock expression erupt upon Austin’s face. “I think it is best you
leave.”

Ridicule wrapped itself around her hastily. Austin felt the flush of
embarrassment creep across her face and chest as they started to burn bright
crimson. She ran from the store confused and completely ashamed of the
treatment.

“When you’re going to push a pregnant woman around next time make sure
you actually have the guts to accept what you did!” She heard from behind her
as she literally ran to her car. That statement did stop her.
Push?!
She
had never even touched Natasha so how the hell had she-
Bitch!
–
she
had been framed beautifully
and she now knew it.

She quickly realized, if no one else had, that the pregnancy must have been
a lie because she had never pushed Natasha and within a week she had gone from
being happily pregnant to not. Irrational she knew, but she had to hang hope on
that. After all, she hadn’t done a thing wrong.

Then it struck her. The comment from earlier that week which she had
tried to brush off was now hitting her properly.
You’ll leave like you did
before, Austin. If it’s not by choice, I’m sure you’ll find yourself forced out
soon
. She knew Natasha was lying about being pregnant all along now. Little
did Natasha know was that Austin wasn’t going to leave without actual physical
force.

Looking back she saw the sales clerk watching from the doorway and
quickly got into her car and headed home. Even in her car it didn’t seem like
she could evade the attention. Everyone was looking and willingly pointing at
her and she was beginning to grow self conscious as she drove.

Pulling into the drive she was thankful to be home until she looked up
and saw one of the living room windows missing. Getting out of her car she
rushed in, her breathing racy, her heart pumping and struggling with the rising
fear.

What she found didn’t even enter her mind.

“Tom, what the hell happened?” she asked as she found her brother
cleaning up glass from the wooden flooring.

“I think this is yours,” Tom told Austin, standing as he did so. He
picked a brick up from the table on the side and handed it to her. “I don’t
know who would do it, but it’s pretty clear what they wanted to convey.”

Austin took the brick and had to sit down. As she read it and felt sick
–
You know you just never should have come back
. She looked up at her
brother with wild, scared bewilderment. She had no idea how to handle this type
of vandalism.

“What is that about?” he asked her, unimpressed by the damage occurred.
“I was lucky I was in the kitchen and not still sitting on the couch.”

Shaking her head, Austin felt a headache beginning to spread across from
temple to temple, “I got thrown out of the grocery store,” she told her brother
looking up at him.
“For being a
murderer
.”

“What?!”
Tom bellowed in shocked aggression. “What the fuck?”

“I got called a murderer and I have suspicion it’s to do with Natasha,”
she admitted and saw the confusion, “She’s not pregnant anymore, Tom, and she
blamed me.”

All of a sudden they heard yelling and the front door opened and her
other brothers and sister came into the room quickly followed by their mother.

“You three leave here now. We can deal with
this
another
day.” Jane said as she followed them in. She was in no mood to
focus on the new accusations around town, but that changed when she looked into
the room. “It seems the news spread fast,” she said and pointed to the window.

“Yeah, literally ten minutes before Austin got back from the store that
she got thrown out of,” Tom told them and watched as none of them tried to
console their sister. “What have you heard?” he asked them as he put two and
two together.

“She pushed Natasha and she lost Tyler’s baby,” Dean said and gave
Austin visual daggers as he looked at her. All the progress they had made to
fix their relationship seemed to just disintegrate within seconds.
 
“I knew you were jealous, but
jeez
,
Aust
...”

“I didn’t do this!” Austin defended shakily, but remained in her seat,
unable to trust her legs to hold her up.

Jane shook her head, she couldn’t do this anymore. She hated to be the
woman who had the unruly daughter, the girl the town had come to hate within
hours. Jane didn’t want to have a connection to Austin anymore. “You’re nothing
but a letdown,” Jane told her daughter and left the house in utter repulsion at
the mere sight of Austin. She had too many thoughts and conflicts battling away
within her that she couldn’t stay.

That was it, Austin wasn’t letting her mother fall for a lie, so she
followed,
literally
chasing her down the road as she
hastily went to her own house. “I didn’t do it!” Austin almost yelled back in
defense
trying to get her mother to see sense and believe
her. “She’s lying!”

Jane put her hands up to make Austin shut up. “I never and I mean never,
Austin, want you to come near this house again,” Jane told her daughter and she
tried to react disgustedly at the sight of her daughter’s immediate tears. “You
aren’t the daughter I brought up, you’re a stranger and I don’t know you. I
will not be associated with a person that will willingly take away another
person’s happiness.”

“Mom,” Austin let out in a half
sob
as the
realization dawned on her. “Don’t do this. Please.” Austin stepped towards her
mother; she couldn’t let her mother disown her. She couldn’t handle there being
no hope between them.

Jane reacted
immediately,
pushing Austin away
from the house across the porch, Austin lost her balance and flew backwards,
hitting the pathway with brute force. Austin lay winded for a moment as she
watched her mother tower over her at the top of the small stair case to the
porch.

Within minutes, Nicolas rushed past and went straight to Austin’s aid.
He hated seeing his daughter hurt at any extent, but at the hands of her own
mother? Now that was beyond anything he had seen before. He had heard the
rumors
, seen the display put on by Natasha, and as
convincing as it was, there was no way he was falling for it. He just couldn’t.

“Nicolas leave her be,” Jane said and stepped away and went toward the
front door.

“Jane,” Nicolas argued back to stop her. He just watched as his wife
turned back and he was filled with utter disappointment. He never thought he
would feel like that towards the woman he had formed a perfect life with in
Point Arena.

Austin, now having some bearings back began to move, “
It’s
fine.” She told her dad and smiled painfully at him. “Go to mom.”

“What about you, Aussie?” he asked as he helped her stand up gingerly.
“You’re hurt.” He noted her bleeding elbow and gasp of initial pain as she got
up.

“Nothing a bit of time won’t heal,” Austin
told her dad softly
and refrained from crying, but it was getting harder and harder. “Just please
believe that I didn’t do a thing. I would never do that.” Austin now sobbed at
her father. She would never bring pain like that on Natasha. “It wasn’t me. I
didn’t do that to her.”

“She’s going to say that,” Jane cut in fiercely. “Now leave Austin
before I call the police and get you arrested for trespassing. I don’t want to
see you around here.”

Feeling fear hit every cell in her being, she left without another word.
If the police got called that meant seeing Tyler or Natasha’s father, and if
they had fallen for the newest lie in Natasha’s twisted game, they weren’t
going to go easy on her. Not only that but, having her own mother threaten her
with the help of the police, Austin couldn’t stand it. Her mother saw her as a
monster and standing here arguing wasn’t going to change a damn thing.

It pained Nicolas greatly to see his daughter walk away, her persona
more broken than he had ever seen. Turning to his wife, he felt angered at the
play of events he had walked out on. “I know you’re holding a grudge, but you
surely can’t really think that Austin did something to Natasha?” he bit hard at
Jane, his tone deep and shaking with his pure anger.
“How can
you be so, so
heart
less?!”

“I don’t know what to think anymore,” Jane said as she broke down into
tears as the realization hit her about what she had just put her daughter
through. She was shaking as everything came to weigh heavily on her shoulders.
She felt weak all of a sudden and she felt that the one little string her
daughter had worked the past couple of months to build was now officially cut.
She had pushed Austin in more ways than one. That last insult was more than a
physical gesture. She knew Austin wouldn’t be back.

“Do you honestly think Austin is capable of that?” Nicolas asked as he
steadied his wife’s shaking hands. He watched her look at him and
shake
her head in response. “So why did you disown her like
her?”

“Be-Because,” Jane paused as she finally admitted this fate, “Because
she disowned us a long time ago.” It was then she fully broke and all Nicolas
could do was
wrap
his arms around Jane and hold her
tight. “She disowned me, Nicolas. My baby girl left me. I can’t forgive that.”

Nicolas knew his wife had taken Austin’s absence to heart, but he never
realized how hard she had allowed it to set.

***

Walking back quickly, Austin felt pleased that the
streets were empty and she was able to get to Tom’s quickly and uninterrupted.
She didn’t want to see the looks of hatred that she had been getting. She
didn’t want to see people that were her friends sneer at her and she did not
want to see Tyler.

She looked around to make sure the house was definitely empty, satisfied
it was she knew she could pack and be gone before Tom got back – if she was
fast. So she ran up the stairs and to her bedroom.