Louis Jefferson lay back on the bed, sighing deeply, noticing how meticulously his sister had planned everything.
Then, he typed a line on his mobile phone: "Sally, I can't treat Ella that way. The person she likes is not me, but Arthur Lindsey. I just gave her the antidote, and she is peacefully asleep now."
Just before he was about to press send, he suddenly hesitated.
Furrowing his brow, he thought for a moment and began to delete the message one word at a time. When he was finished, his fingers trembled unintentionally.
At last, he was practically shaking as he typed the final words:
"She is mine now."
...
That night, Louis Jefferson spent the night awake in the adjacent bedroom, leaning against the head of the bed.
In his mind, the hardships of his childhood at the orphanage, the warm and simple times as a teenager, the sensitive and lonely years as a young adult... cycles of time were intertwined with the footprints of Ella Lacey.
He liked her, without a doubt.
