The days that followed that week were the darkest Mary had lived through in a long time.
Little by little she stopped caring about anything around her and ended up shutting herself almost completely in her room, where she spent hours lying on the bed staring at the ceiling without really thinking about anything.
She barely ate, slept poorly, and lost any clear sense of time.
The days began blending together until they became indistinguishable, and with them, the few routines she still had left disappeared too.
She stopped fixing herself up, stopped caring about her clothes, even her own hygiene, as if none of it mattered to her anymore.
Mary got so bad that she seriously considered killing herself.
The guilt over what she'd done to Rebecca, the certainty of having destroyed with her own hands the one good thing that had ever happened to her, and the emptiness of knowing she would never get close to Mark again, dug into her chest like stakes that wouldn't let her breathe.
