Moon // l. dunbar

prologue

The woman lay there silently, hands crossed delicately across her middle. Her blonde hair was done up in a milkmaid braid, flowers littering it every once in a while. She was dressed up as if going somewhere special, her favorite dress covering her pale skin beautifully and her favorite shoes to match placed on crossed feet. Her eyes didn't so much as flutter. Her chest didn't rise and fall. She didn't twitch. The woman was dead.

Freya McDavis was dead. Dead as in never coming back.

The blonde girl looking down on the woman did her best to keep her tears from falling as everyone watched her expectantly. She wouldn't give in a let them watch her wall tumble down. She'd keep her mother's will to defy expectations alive if it was the last thing she did.

Anais Marie McDavis would not cry over the death of her mother. She would wait until she was alone to mourn, right now, she was going to give her mother the best damn funeral eulogy this world had ever seen.

She glanced back at her grandfather, he gave her a soft, watery smile before nodding his approval.

Anais looked down at the paper in front of her, the words blurring as she fought hard to hold back tears. Swallowing a few times she began her address to the large crowd gathered in honor of her mother's tragic death. The words didn't seem to compute with her own ears, she kept her gaze on the man who would now be her guardian, reading directly off the page from memory.

The words came to a sudden halt as she finished, stepping down from in front of the crowd and taking her seat next to her grandpa as the minister who was going to finish off the service took her place.

Beacon Hills, that's all she had to wait for was to get to Beacon Hills, far away from here, locked in a room at her grandfather's house where she could sob and scream all she wanted.

This was going to be a long four years.