The Gift

Chapter Fifteen

The next morning, Jeremiah left.  While he was gone, I took advantage of their training arena.  After a week of spending almost all my time there, Amelia came in to watch me in the middle of one of the sequences.  I’d set up their hardest target training.  The targets all moved.  Some dropped down from above and others sprang up from below; others still moved forward and back and around the arena.

I practiced with the targets with my throwing knives and with my arrow and bows.  After over an hour of running around the arena and attacking targets I sank to the ground in a heap.

“Fey, this isn’t going to help anything,” Amelia told me, coming over to where I sat on the ground.

“I can’t feel anything,” I said after a minute. “I just want to feel something, anything.  I just feel so dead inside.”

“Training until you collapse out of exhaustion isn’t going to fix that.  The only thing that will is facing the issue.”

“I can’t go back and talk to him.  It broke my heart to walk away the first time.  If I face him again before I’ve taken care of whoever is sending assassins after me, I don’t think I could do it again.”

“Then don’t.  Don’t walk away from him again.”

“I can’t face him now.  I can’t do it, Amelia.”

“You’re only hurting yourself.”

“What if it were you and Jeremiah in our places?  What would you do?”

“I would tell him the truth; the whole truth.  We would face it together.  I would not have crushed either of us with the pretense of trying to protect him.”

“Then I envy you.  I wish I could be as straightforward and honest as you.  I cannot lie but I also avoid telling the truth as much as possible.  You say you would have been honest with him and told him everything.  I can’t do that.  He knows more about me that I’ve told anybody but you and Jeremiah, at the urging of my little friend up here, but I just can’t bring myself to completely let him in.”

“You have to learn to trust, Fey.  When this is done, if you go back-and I think that you should-you have to be upfront with this Christopher.  You need to tell him your whole story.  When things happen you have to tell him and confide in him.  Without that trust, any relationship that you have will fall apart.”

“I trusted them with so many things.  My own life was placed in the hands of the bandmembers so many times.”

“Yet you cannot bring yourself to trust them with your story.”

“You and Jeremiah are the only people I’ve ever told in its entirety.  Christopher knows parts and the other men know bits and pieces but I can’t seem to bring myself to trust them with more.  If I go back, I might try to trust them with more.  Right now, I don’t see myself going back.  They treated me like a younger sister and all I did was endanger them.”