CHAPTER FOUR:
LITTLE GIRL

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SHAY CHAMBERS WAS FIFTEEN years old when her father, Connor Chambers, died. The same age as her brother, Shay was a lot more immature and far less guarded than she had to be now, at the age of eighteen going on nineteen. She had no reason to work every day of the week, no younger brother to care for like a son. She had her own admittedly less important problems to worry about, the typical problems that came with being a teenage freshman in high school. Like the number of times she could skip class before the school caught on to what she was doing and told her parents, or figuring out the reason for why her boyfriend, Tyler Crowley, didn't send her heart racing into a frenzy like Lauren Mallory did whenever she met the brunette's gaze across a classroom or in the hallways. Shay Chambers was a whole lot happier back then. Now, she could barely get through each day without feeling completely and utterly exhausted.

For everything had changed for her in just one instant, and things were never going to be the same again.

The morning of her father's death, Shay was driven to school by her mother. Melody Chambers; a woman Shay once loved and trusted with all her heart. Her mother had pulled into the high school parking lot, kissed her only daughter on the cheek, and promised to be there to pick her up after school. Then, she drove away with Shay's younger brother chatting eagerly to her in the back seat. Shay had watched them disappear with a wave, and then she rushed to meet Tyler before the bell rang. 

Her day passed by quickly, and soon enough, Shay was sitting on the sidewalk waiting for her mum to come and get her. At first, Melody Chambers was only five minutes late. Shay wasn't too worried, those five minutes could easily be chalked up to her her mother getting stuck in traffic, or having car trouble. The cheap hunk of metal her mother called a car was always playing up, it wouldn't surprise Shay if she'd broken down somewhere. But soon, five minutes became ten minutes, and ten minutes turned into half an hour, and then an hour. Shay was a panicking mess, alone in an empty parking lot with rain drizzling down from the greying sky, thunder gathering in the distance. She'd moved to sit on the front steps of the office when the rain started, her flip-phone pressed to her ear as she was sent time and time again to her mother's voicemail, begging to know where she was.

Just as Shay was thinking about walking home, her stomach twisting with nerves, a police cruiser pulled into the school's parking lot. Charlie Swan, the Chief of Police in their tiny utensil town, stepped out into the rain, catching sight of the young girl sitting on the stairs. He moved towards her, his ashen face sending Shay's heart plummeting to the pit of her stomach. She scrambled to her feet, rushing to meet him halfway, knowing something was very very wrong if the police had been called.

"Shay Chambers?" Charlie asked, though he already knew it was her. She was a spitting image of her mother with her father's eyes, just like her younger brother. The thought sent a stab of pain through his chest.

"Has something happened to my mum?" she demanded to know, tears of frustration and fear burning in her eyes. "She's left me sitting here for the past hour! Is she hurt?"

"No, not her," he shook his head.

"Then who?" she snapped, forgetting that he was a person of power and it wasn't a smart idea to be rude to him.

"It's your dad," Charlie muttered, his eyes glistening with pity.

And just like that, Shay's world began to spiral.

A car crash, he told her as he drove her to the local hospital. To where Shay's mother had rushed to after picking up Sebastian from school, receiving a call on the way to Forks High where she learned that her husband had been hit by a drunk driver, that they'd tried their best to save him, but his injuries were too serious, too fatal for them to fix.

Shay didn't know how to react. Later, when she looked back on everything, she remembered feeling numb, like someone had ripped out her heart, taking every emotion she could possibly feel along with it. But she also remembered crying, crying harder than she ever had before, her body aching as she leaned over in her seat, head in her hands as she sobbed. 

Not her dad, not Connor Chambers, there had to be a mistake. Her dad couldn't be dead. This had to be a nightmare, a horribly realistic nightmare.

Her mother was sobbing, screaming when Shay stepped into the waiting room of Forks' hospital. Sebastian was sitting outside Connor's room, whispering with blurry eyes to a nurse who was trying to block out his mother's horrible, heartbroken cries. Sebastian had rushed over to Shay the moment he saw her walk through the door, wrapping his skinny twelve-year-old arms around her waist, drenching her denim jacket with his tears as they watched their mother cling to their father's motionless figure, begging him to wake up, to come back to her. She shouted for him to tell her that this was one big joke, that he was sorry and he loved her and was never going to let her go again. Death would not be what tore them apart.

But it had. Connor was dead. Melody was alive. Two souls forced apart by the merciless hands of Death. It was funny how fate worked.

In the months that followed, Melody Chambers began to change. Shay turned sixteen, and instead of celebrating as a normal teenager would have, she took her mother's crappy car and drove to The Carver Cafe, a place her father would once take her every Thursday for the Thursday Dinner Special. Just the two of them, father-daughter bonding time, something that Shay would never get to do again. Not with her dad, anyway. She asked the owner, a lovely lady named Cora, if there were any job openings, and spent most of her sweet sixteen wiping down counters and serving customers. She returned home that evening to a hand-made card from her brother and a blank stare from her mother as she announced that she was going on her first long-term business trip. And with that, Melody disappeared for a month.

One whole month. Thirty days. For the first week, Shay was an absolute wreck. She didn't know how to care for herself let-alone Sebastian, a growing boy. She kept telling herself that her mum would be home soon, that Melody would snap out of her sadness and be the mother that she and Sebastian desperately needed her to be. And while Melody returned like she said she would, her sadness was as strong as ever, a burning flame she carried with her everywhere she went.

By the time Shay turned seventeen, Melody was working with every chance she got. Her sadness disappeared, but the thirst to distract herself from her husband's memory became her only focus in life. And if she wasn't working, she was out partying with her friends, or she was tangled in the sheets with men and women alike, people who could distract her from everything that reminded her of Connor.

When Shay turned eighteen, Melody gave up the mother role completely. Shay was a legal adult, she could take care of Sebastian well enough. She'd proved that much to Melody in the past two years. The kids were lucky to see their mother once in the span of six months. And sadly, they had gotten used to it, used to their mother being a blurry figure in the back of their minds, a ghost instead of a parent. Soon, Sebastian began to look to Shay as his mother, clung to her more than he ever had before, and they'd always been close. For if Shay was to leave him, he would have no one. No one but a dead father, an absent mother and a sister who couldn't take the stress of being a parent when she was still a kid herself. 

So now that Melody had returned - for how long, neither of them knew, and don't even get them started on why she decided to come back - neither knew what to think. Sure, she used to pop in and out of home on the odd occasion she remembered their existence, but she looked to have been there for hours, kicking back on their couch eating their food watching their television. Shay was furious, blind with anger. She wanted to scream, to grab the wicked woman by her hair and drag her through the front door, kick her to the curb like she'd tossed them aside when the going got tough.

But despite the rage simmering in her veins, she couldn't do it.

For deep down, buried under the resentment and the heartache she pretended not to have, Shay Chambers still loved her mother, she still craved for Melody's approval. It was twisted, she knew, to want the praise and affection of a woman who could no longer give such emotions to her kids without her husband around to help her. But under the rough, mature skin that Shay had been forced to wear under the watchful eyes of Forks and Sebastian, she was still that same little girl who was left alone for an hour wondering why her mother hadn't come to pick her up from school. She was still that same little girl who cried her eyes out in Charlie Swan's police cruiser when he came to break the news that her dad was dead. She was still that same little girl who held her baby brother close and watched her mother scream over her father's body, begging him to wake up, to evade Death's clutches just a little bit longer. For her, for their kids.

And that part of her, she feared, was never going to go away. For that was her. That was Shay Chambers. The little girl hiding under a skin of lies, pretending to be brave and strong when in reality, she still wanted her mother to hold her and tell her everything would be okay in the end. 

Even if life had taught her that nothing could ever just be okay. There was always going to be something or someone there to tear her back down.

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INTRODUCING...

HUGH JACKMAN 
as CONNOR CHAMBERS