Safe in Zoe's arms, Sharice feels herself relax. Her familiar smell – expensive perfume and shower gel, hand sanitizer and antibacterial soap and the ever-present wafts of cigarettes and coffee – envelops her and her tears begin to wane. She lifts herself away and sits back against the sofa. Her eyes meet Zoe's, which are filled with concern.
"It was all my fault. I didn't want- I never wanted- It wasn't supposed to end like that. They were just being so- suffocating. I never had a minute to myself, they wouldn't leave me in peace, I couldn't even think. I only wanted to get away for a little while …"
As she tells Zoe of the last few weeks, the memories, still harsh and cutting deep into her thoughts, fill her mind.
That initial exhilaration of catching that bus and not caring where it went, followed by that feeling of self importance as she walked the streets, walking past people who didn't know that she had run away. But then the cold. She had never known that anyone could feel so deeply, achingly cold, chilling her right to the bone as she huddled against the wall for comfort against the frosty breeze. She felt invisible as she sat there, blending into the wall behind her as peoples' gazes slipped by. And that hunger, so empty that it filled her, so much so that she followed the first people who promised her a bite and a bed.
But that had been a huge mistake. Granted, she was warmer and she had had the remains of a takeaway, but the threat of the men who watched her every move proved to be greater than the ignorance of the streetwalkers. And then they tried to make her drink. She knew what drink could do to people. She had seen drink turn her father slowly from someone who made her feel safe and wanted, to someone who hit her mother until she broke, and to someone lying in a coffin. She was never going to end up the same way. They had tried to stop her leaving, but in the end, they didn't really care if she stayed or went, so they let her go.
As she walked back through her front door, she was so thankful to see her grandmother's face that she failed to register her anger at first. But as the words rained hard down on her ears, there was no way she could mistake the devastation that she, Sharice had caused. "A massive heart attack." "Nothing they could do." "All that stress."
"It's all your fault."
The guilt and the grief of her grandfather's death stayed bottled up for days. She barely said anything as her nana rang all their friends to let them know, or when she made arrangements for their Spanish friends to stay. She would stay in her room and cry or just lie in her bed, blaming herself, hating herself for what she had done. It was at the funeral that she snapped. Sick of feeling lonely and tired, she caught the bus straight to Holby, knowing that she couldn't live with Kaye anymore, not when every time her nana looked at her, she saw a murderer.
"So, can I stay with you, just for a while?" Sharice looked Zoe in the eye again, pleading, begging.