Love's Arithmetic

Revelations XXIX

Almost two years after her kidnapping….

Life had gone on lazily enough over the past year and a half for Caer. She had fallen into a routine that left her satisfied and completely calm. She didn’t worry about danger or fear any more, all the mysterious horrors of her past were dead and gone.

Her cottage on Tybee Island was gated and secluded with her own private boardwalk down to the beach just a couple hundred yards from her back porch. This allowed her to go out without any disturbance, which she thoroughly enjoyed. Her neighbors were nice, if a little distant, she did not mind, the only time she saw them was when she took out the trash on collection days.

It was much different from the other places she had lived. Her parent’s ranch in Montana was full of hard work, work that she didn’t mind. It was satisfying to see how everything came together. She loved the ranch, but she could not get away from things there. Her family surrounded her, and while they loved her, she could not stand their questions and the glances they exchanged when they thought she was not looking.

Her apartment in Manhattan, her dream home, or so she had thought before she’d been kidnapped from the supposedly secure building, had been the ideal place to live. She had fulfilled her calling of matchmaking and had made a lot of great friends in the city through various functions that she participated in. She had lived the life of an elite socialite, her wealth from an inheritance from her grandparents she had had no worries or cares.

Now, in her cottage, which was closer to a house, she was able to lazy the days away without really doing much but trying to combat with the heat and figure out how to keep her flowers alive long enough to enjoy them.  She found herself viewing this as the ideal home and place to live. It was crowded with tourists during the summer, but they were friendly enough and she was able to blend in well enough. She enjoyed the restaurants and the spontaneous trips to Savannah when she wanted to indulge herself.

It had taken a long time for Caer to gain the courage to travel to Savannah. There was still an underlying fear when she was alone in a dark place, but that had slowly ebbed into a small pinprick of a reminder as she realized that it was statistically impossible that anything remotely as horrible would happen to her again.

She was able to forget it most times now and her family realized that. No one spoke about what happened almost two years ago, at least not when she was around. She knew they talked, what kind of family would they be if they didn’t talk? Aunt Urma was the worst at hiding it. Every time she visited, the worry showed on her face. She had always been more emotional than any other member of her family, and though she tried to hide it, she wore it on her sleeve.

Caer decided that one day she would be able to talk about it, and as she sat on her porch, the journal she had committed to writing in every day open in her lap, she wrote down a date:  11 July 2011. That was three months away, maybe then she would be able to talk about it, talk to Garrett about what happened between them…

11 July 2011…

The calendar was circled, the alarm on her phone had gone off and she knew what today was. She knew that it was the day that she would talk with Garrett today, and that made her nervous.

Over the last three months she had been planning out what she would do with this day. Would she just call her parents up and say, “I’m ready to talk about what happened.”? Or would she just tell a random person? All those ideas had been mentally shot down along with hundreds of others.

She had been in therapy for a while and the meetings with Dr. George Cuthbert had left her unsatisfied. The sessions had lasted for an hour. It was a full hour of her sitting silently across the room from an uptight man in a very expensive toupee.