t h i r t y - f i v e

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"Natalia honey, I can't even begin to imagine how hard this must be for you

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"Natalia honey, I can't even begin to imagine how hard this must be for you."

A soft, superficially mellow female voice came for the little girl in anomalous echoes of three.

"I'm very sorry about your sister, but we must go over the details to fully understand what happened. Now, you say you found your mother on the floor..."

The eerie reverberation in her ear abruptly began morphing into a shrill ringing screech, rattling every cell of her frail body. The social worker's soft words were drowning out in the excruciating loud noise. She couldn't help but latch her palms to her ears in a dire attempt to make it all stop.

"Natalia, are you alright?" The woman said with concern emanating in her tone, yet her voice never reached the nine year old, who kept wincing with her hands desperately blocking her ears.

"Natalia?"

She closed her eyes shut, wishing it would all just go away.

"Miss Meyers?"

The noise stopped at once.

"Miss Meyers?"

This time it was a deeper, distinctly masculine voice that sounded in the background. Her lids fluttered wearily open and it instantly dawned upon her where she was.

Deadbeat silence desolately blanketed the very air they all stood surrounded in.
Apart from all the insolent chatter coming from the corridors of the building, the day was doomed to bask in unbearable quietness.

"I think she's in shock."

Tahlia Meyers sat with her arms snaked around her knees, wild auburn hair sheathing most of the vicinity around her exposed blanched face. Her eyes were vacant, not even a single trace of unclouded emotion peeking through.

Her head was still whirling.

"Miss Meyers are you listening to me?" A rich brown-skinned pair of fingers snapped in front of her eyes, finally capturing her attention.

She blinked up, only to find the familiar face of Sergeant Randall hovering right by her seated figure. 

"May I sit here?" He asked, motioning with a slight tilt of the head towards the little vacant space beside her on the limestone staircase she currently sat on, adjacent to the elevator. 

She turned her gaze away, shrugging her shoulders with a negligible movement, as her eyes landed on a stray speck on a limestone tile.

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