Give me a second chance

Jade didn’t want to open her eyes. It couldn’t have been no more than an hour ago since she had last gone to sleep after staying up with her four year old daughter, Libby, for most of the night. Libby had unfortunately contracted one of those nasty twenty four hour viruses from pre-school and the poor thing couldn’t hold down a thing, not even ginger ale.

Jade held her small, sweat dampened body until she finally fell asleep. After tucking Libby into her Princess toddler bed and making sure that she was down for the count she silently tip toed out of her room. Yawning widely and seriously sleep deprived herself, she headed for her own bed hoping for just a few blissful hours of sleep before Libby woke up again.

Evidently, someone else had different ideas. The phone on her nightstand started to ring. She tried to ignore it hoping that whomever it was would get the picture but five minutes later it rang again and then again, Someone was awfully determined to rouse her from her restless sleep.

“Damn,” she muttered the un-lady like curse and rolled on to her side. She glanced over at the alarm clock and groaned when she saw that is was only four thirty in the morning. One hour. She had only been asleep for one hour before being so rudely awakened by a phone call of all things.

Reaching out she grabbed for the phone and frowned at the unrecognizable number on the caller ID. The area code was familiar to her though but not the number itself. (336) was a North Carolina area code, but it had been years since she last talked to anyone in North Carolina, especially in Hillsborough, the small town that she spent her first eighteen years of her life.

Last she had heard, her father still lived there in the small town but it had been almost four years since she had last talked to Jed Sampson and that phone call did not end well at all.

Jade was an only child and her mother had died from pancreatic cancer before she could even talk. Being raised by her father wasn’t easy for her and the two of them had a very tumultuous relationship from the time that she first hit puberty.

Growing up Jed had been a stern father. He had no patience for Jade’s many wild exploits when she was growing up. He was a Southern Baptist Preacher and held tight to his values. Day after day he tried to drill those same values into his young rebellious daughter until eventually she just upped and left town without even bothering to say good bye.

What her father was unaware of was Jade’s initial reason for leaving in the first place. Although he was a cankerous old man, he was not the reason for her taking off in such a ruthless fashion. That honor belonged to an arrogant sexed up eighteen year old who so callously broke her tender heart.

She had given Austin Giles everything she had ; her heart, her soul, her entire being and none of that was good enough. The day that she had walked in on him and that two bit whore, Tina Mells, getting it on, she had surmised that she would never be enough for Austin and made her mind up right then to leave town.

There was no way that she could live in the same town as Austin, much less county or state. Bumping into him at the local grocer and seeing him with other girls hanging all over him would have been just too much for her to handle. And there would have been other girls, plenty of them.

So she did the only thing that she felt she could do, leave.

Jade went home and packed that very same day. She packed the bare essentials and got in her candy red 1979 Camaro. She started the ignition, jerked the car in gear and pulled out of Hillsborough, never once looking back.

A year and a half later Jade finally gave in and called her father wanting to make a mends. Alone, a new mother herself, she only wanted the security that she knew her father could offer her.

Jed had been open to the suggestion of her returning home until he found out that she had a child out of wedlock and promptly disowned her on the spot. They hadn’t talked since that one heart wrenching phone call. Jade was too proud and her father was too ignorant to bridge that gap.

So Jade only worried about one thing now, and that was Libby, her precious daughter. She lived for the angel that saved her life. When she first left town Jade had been hell bent on rousing as much trouble as possible. She waited tables in the sleaziest of bars, drank too much and had more one night stands than she could count. When she found out that she was pregnant, Jade’s life came to a grinding halt.

Jade was hit hard with a reality check. The devil may care life style that she had been living was no good to bring up a baby in. Doing a complete one-eighty, Jade went out and found her self a respectable job as a receptionist for a moving company and saved enough money to rent a small apartment.

A year later she had lost her job do to cutbacks and that is when she tried to reach out to her father only to be refuted for her actions. Nothing in life came easy for Jade but she had grit and determination. Four years later, they had made it. They didn’t have a lot of extra money, but Jade had enough. Working her way through the ranks she was now an executive assistant and made a decent living, more than enough to provide for her baby girl and she did it all on her own.

The phone in Jade’s hand rang again bringing her back to the present. Breathing out she flipped open her phone and gave a tentative “Hello.”

“Jade, is this Jade Sampson ?” The man’s voice on the other line asked.

“Yes, this is she,” she replied hesitantly.

“I don’t know if you remember me or not but this is Oliver Humphrey down in Hillsborough, we went to school together.”

The name was familiar and through her sleep fogged brain Jade could vaguely picture a scrawny red head with freckles back from high school.

But why are you calling me at 4 :30 in the morning ? She wondered idly.

After the span of a heart beat she said “Okay ?” and waited expectantly for him to go on further.

“Well you see ma’am, I am Sheriff now. Sheriff of Hillsborough and I’m afraid I have some bad news for you.”

A chill prickled at the back of Jade’s neck and a knot the size of tennis ball seemed to get lodged in her throat. Swallowing past the knot she forced herself to ask, “What’s the matter ?”