Captive

Chapter Twenty Three

Stretching out in the unfamiliar bed, feeling the sheets wrapped around her legs, telling the story of her dream filled sleep, Juliet carefully sat up, detangling herself in the process. The sun was pouring through the window already creating golden pools of light around the floor and when she looked across to the clock she saw that it was half past eight. With a start she went to get up, panicked but then she flopped back, relaxing. She was not his captive any more, she could wake when she chose to, get up when she chose to. Looking up at the ceiling she found a small off-white patch where the paint had peeled a little and smiled as her imagination cast it into the shape of a maple leaf. Her mind burnt with the memory of finding that leaf when she was four years old, of the veins thrumming still with the life of the tree, the rich, deep red brilliant against the grey path and the thrill of keeping it as her secret, hidden from the gaze of her overbearing father. And she recalled handing it over shyly to the boy who despite the age gap between them had been kind, friendly. A small smile lifted the corners of her lips as she recalled that he had kept it, immortalised in laminate as a bookmark that he still used.

Juliet's feelings for Bret were complex and now that she had some space to explore them without him physically being here she could acknowledge just how complicated they were. As a child she had looked for him every time she came to Calgary, searched him out in every face she saw and inevitably she would find him, see him and they would spend precious time together which built a picture in her head of the boy she believed him to be. He became more a fantasy than a reality, those snapshots of him took on a life of their own, creating a near perfect person who could not possibly live up to the hero she had made him in her head when it came to being in the real world. She could acknowledge now that she took only those positive interactions when he had comforted her, talked kindly with her, kissed her to make the image of Bret in her head, a dream boy who she  had fallen head over heels in love with.

As an adult those dreams were still as vivid in her head, made concrete every time she reached to her throat and felt the reassuring weight of the maple leaf there. After Jason had held her captive it had been holding onto the dream of Bret that kept her going, the hope that there was some goodness in the world if she could just find it again. But she had avoided Canada, afraid of her family or worse Bret finding out what had happened to her, of her shame being exposed.  And her mum needed her. After Edward left, Rachel became dependent on her daughter when she finally finished school, leaning on her for companionship, oblivious in her own grief to the changes in her daughter. After almost eighteen years of being virtually invisible to her mother, Juliet had craved that sudden closeness, keeping the scars, physical and mental, from her mother's sight as they spent more and more time together, reading and visiting London, attending seminars, going to the theatre. All things they both enjoyed and which pulled them closer together. She buried herself in her studies, completing assignment after assignment and finding those old notes about Jane Austen which she began, with her mother's support and critical eye to turn into a book. Rachel had been excited by her daughter's talent, keen to nurture it and so proud of her when the book was published and Juliet was hailed as bright new light in literary writing, a prodigy of sorts.

But then Edward had come back on the scene. Perhaps he thought ten years was long enough. She would never forget the day she had walked into the kitchen and found him sitting there with a cup of tea. He had smiled at her, even gone to embrace her though she had been quick to avoid the physical contact with him. As soon as Rachel was out of earshot he had leaned towards her, told her that he loved her mother too much to forget her, begged her to let him come back, stated he had been utterly miserable these last ten years and he was not his brother.  Juliet was no fool, she knew Edward had spent eight years working for the BBC making quasi dramas about the lives of notable Victorian authors and the work had dried up. He had nothing else and had come prowling back to her mother who was by now a hugely successful and celebrated author with six books in the series she had written under her belt, all of which had been dramatised and were soon to be picked up as movies as well. Rachel Cavanagh was a wealthy woman, still stunningly beautiful and a real catch for any man. And Juliet wished she could have fallen for any man but a Turner man.