Chapter 1- Don’t miss me when I’m gone.

The loud rings of the phone echoed through the house, ripping Daniyah from her sleep. This was the fifth time this morning that the phone had rung, and it was only nine o’clock. Each time, her boyfriend had picked it up almost immediately and she’d drifted back to sleep. She’d assumed that Derek was having a particularly busy morning, he’d been complaining about the mounting stress of his job due to the changes at his firm since his new promotion.

She had been, and still was, concerned about the stress, but all that she needed was some sleep. Days off came rarely to her as a result of her newly opened business and she desperately needed a couple of hours to recharge after a quite hectic week. Sitting up in the warm bed, she gently rubbed at her eyes, trying to clear the sleep from them. Even though Derek had tried to keep the phone calls from waking her up, it had been to no avail.

She cringed as soon as her bare feet hit the cold floor. Summer had been gone for a little while now, and though it wasn’t quite snowing yet, it was definitely getting chilly. She’d always told Derek to turn up the heat before bed every night, but he had the memory of a goldfish when it came to certain things apparently. She quickly slipped into her warm house shoes; put up her long, messy hair into a ponytail, and padded her way down to the kitchen for her daily cup of coffee. She could hear the sound of Derek mumbling into the phone as she got closer to the kitchen and briefly wondered what was so important that it had to be discussed in such a low voice.

Entering the kitchen, she noticed that Derek had a quite sombre look on his face. He was definitely not Mr. Sunshine in the mornings, but he was far from depressing. He stood behind the kitchen counter, and looked like he was miles away. Come to think of it, the phone calls from this morning had been answered in rather hushed tones. He’d sounded somewhat angry and surprised, but she’d just chucked it up to another client acting up. “Well someone woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning,” she said, as she walked by him to pour herself a cup of coffee. She was trying to lighten the situation with some humour, but failing miserably as always. Normally, he would’ve laughed and told her to stop getting her humour from bubblegum wrappers, but this time all she got back was silence.

“Okay, seriously, what is up with you this morning?” she asked, with a more serious tone in her voice.

“I think you might want to take a seat,” he finally replied, turning to face her with that damn sad look still on his face. She took a large sip of the lukewarm coffee in her hand and shrugged. She knew he wasn’t going to spill whatever was bothering him until she took that seat, one of his more stubborn traits that never ceased to annoy her.

“So who died?” she asked jokingly. Her heart started to race as soon as she saw the shocked expression appear on his face. She’d just been joking, but apparently someone really was dead. “Oh my goodness, is it Jolene?” she asked, the panic in her voice becoming very obvious. Her sister was always getting into one bad situation or the other and she was truly petrified that she had gone and gotten herself into a situation that no one could bail her out of.

“No, no it’s not her, she’s fine,” he quickly retorted, trying to calm her down. There was a small moment of silence as Daniyah mentally ran through everyone she knew who he could be talking about. Still, she came up with nothing. She didn’t even want to think about who it might be, and desperately hoped that it wasn’t anyone she was really close to.

“It’s- it’s your father,” he finally stuttered out, looking down at the floor as he said those painful words she’d hoped to never hear in her life. It was as if the world had stopped for a couple of seconds after he uttered those four words. Everything became quiet as if they knew that her world had just come crashing down. Again.

She watched as her coffee mug slipped out of her grip and fell to the floor, breaking into tiny pieces. She was surprised to hear a large gasp and a deathly sounding wail coming from somewhere. She watched as Derek rushed to pick her up, and hold her as if something was wrong. Suddenly, the normal morning noises returned, but this time they were tinged with the sounds of someone weeping. She wanted to scream at whoever was making those noises; couldn’t they tell that she’d just lost one of the most important people to her? She just wanted a bit of silence to make sense of it all. Then, she realized that she was the one wailing like a mad woman, she was the one standing in a pool of lukewarm coffee with broken pieces of glass everywhere. She was the one being held by her boyfriend as her body shook with the force of her sobs. Her father was dead and she prayed, and pleaded that this was all just a sick joke.

“You have to be kidding me!” she yelled, “He can’t be gone!” Derek continued to hold her, rubbing her back as her crying only began to get louder. “Shh, it’s okay baby,” he replied, “It’s going to be alright”

“But he promised,” she said, her eyes tearing up again, “He said he’d never leave me.”