Chapter 3 Three

• “Hope Jake didn’t give you any trouble when I was away?”, Rosie asked, glancing across the dining table at her friend and housekeeper.
• Jake almost choked on his food when he heard this. He quickly shot Sarah a pleading glance. Usually, he would be quite confident that she wouldn’t spill the beans about what had happened, but the way she had been so angry with him ever since she helped his friends escape, he could no longer trust her to keep his secret.
• Sarah noticed his pleading glance, but she pretended not to.
• “Well,” she said to Rosie with a careless shrug, “he didn’t cause me too much trouble though.”
• Immediately, she felt Jake poking her legs with his feet. This annoyed Sarah so much that she dropped her cutlery and fixed him with a withering scowl.
• Jake quickly withdrew his feet and faced his meal.
• After dinner, they all left the dining room and went their separate ways. But about half an hour later, Jake came back downstairs. He saw Sarah leaning against the wall in the living room with her phone in her hand. She seemed a bit frustrated. Apparently, she had been calling a number that wasn’t going through at the moment.
• Feeling curious, Jake asked her, “Are you okay? Any problems? Anything I can help with?”
• Until now, she had been standing with her back to him, but when she heard his voice, she quickly turned around to look at him. “No, it’s nothing serious,” she said with a shrug. “I’m just trying to reach my daughter, that’s all.”
• Denise, Mrs. Garcia’s daughter, was a college student who was about a year older than Jake. He had seen her a few times, but they weren’t really close. Sarah had been pretty good at keeping her personal life separated from her work life even though she pretty much lived with the Martins.
• “I guess I’ll just have to try again later like the operator says,” she said with a sigh and began to walk away.
• But to her surprise, Jake grabbed her arm to hold her back. She was not really fat per se, but her chubby arm felt good to the touch. It was warm, smooth and soft, quite like a baby’s. In fact, Jake would have told her this, but this time, he was in a very serious mood.
• “I’d like to ask though, what have I done? Why have you been so angry with me today?”, he asked, staring directly into her eyes as he waited for an answer.
• Sarah had been surprised by the fact that he held her back by grabbing her arm. Now, that surprise had been trumped by the surprise she felt when she heard this question of his. How could she be angry at him? For what reason? She wanted to deny such an accusation when all of a sudden, she remembered what had transpired previously. Oh! Now she knew what he meant.
• With this realisation came a sudden flow of annoyance and she roughly pulled her arm out of his grip and stomped off without a word.
• Jake sighed in frustration as he watched her leave. What could be the reason for this unusual anger, he wondered? This wasn’t the first time he had annoyed her, but this was certainly the first time she was reacting like this. Normally, she was always gentle with him – so much that his mother sometimes teasingly accused her of pampering him. He used to find it distasteful that she treated him like a child, but now that she was treating him like a fellow adult, he had to admit that it was even more distasteful. He did not like it at all. Ugh! If only he could reach into her mind and find out what she was thinking!
• After leaving Jake in the living room, Sarah had gone straight to her room. She knew her behaviour looked a little petty, but she couldn’t help herself. She needed Jake to feel the way he was currently feeling because that was exactly how she felt too. It was only fair that he got a taste of what his actions were causing her. In fact, she was determined to keep her anger running for as long as possible.