Caroline

Chapter 2

Caroline awoke the next morning, unsure of her surroundings. The smell of the room was unfamiliar, and the sunlight was coming in from an odd direction. She was not in the bedroom she had shared with Derek; definitely not. Nor was it her old bedroom in her father's house, where she had been sleeping since that awful day. No, she realized, finally. This was her home, the first she had ever been able to call her own. Closing her eyes again, she languidly stretched out, allowing herself to take up more room than she ever could have beside Derek or in her old twin. This bed was the only truly new thing in her home, and she was glad she had had the foresight to buy it. A strange way to declare her independence, perhaps, but it suited her.

Every other piece of furniture had once been owned by her parents. It was her way of keeping everything from being new and strange. Nothing from her life with her former fiance was allowed in. Though she had lovingly selected each piece that had gone into their apartment, into what was to be their first home as a married couple, they all carried a taint now. She didn't need those mementos. The bitter taste of betrayal lingered well enough alone, without need of visual aids.

Bird song teased her ears as awareness settled more firmly upon her. Some familiar, but some were different, too, there in the wooded hills where she had chosen to live.
She had vacationed in the North Carolina mountains every summer since before she could remember. First, with her parents and grandparents, but their traveling party had grown smaller as the years had gone by. Her grandparents had each succumbed to their respective final illnesses. At fourteen, she had lost her mother. They would have been riding together that day, but Caroline had decided to spend time with a friend instead. She still asked herself if she could have done anything to save them both from the head on collision, but knew the logical answer. So it was just she and her father for several years, making the ritual trip alone together, until the year when, newly in love, she had decided to stay behind with Derek. That was followed by the year Derek had proclaimed that he would be miserable "in the middle of God-forsaken nowhere," so she had stayed behind again. The year after that, her father had begun his chemotherapy.

All of which led to now and here. She had found this cabin tucked in the woods, but not too far from civilization should she want it. There were other cabins scattered nearby, but not close enough to be seen through the trees. The mountain cabin she had shared with her family had become much too large for only two people, and impossible to maintain for only one. But her sentiment for it ran deep, so she had decided to lease it out to tourists rather than sell. Her suburban childhood home, where her father had continued to live, she'd put on the market. She did not intend to spend any more time there than she already had. Charlotte was a nice enough city, but there was no longer anything there to keep her. She had been neglectful of her friendships from before Derek, and could barely call them acquaintances any more. Instead, she had been absorbed into Derek's social circle. She knew at least someone from that group had known of Derek's infidelity before she did. She also knew that none of them seemed to mind when she extricated herself from them.

When her father had become too ill to care for himself, Caroline had left her job to be his caregiver. It wasn't a hardship. She had always lived simply, as she had been taught, and for which Derek had often teased her. But the truth of the matter, the one that almost no one knew, was that Caroline's simple-living father had been a wealthy man. After she was given his power of attorney, she had learned exactly how wealthy, and was astonished. In hindsight, she knew she shouldn't have been. The brilliant man that she called "Daddy" had paid her full tuition to UNC; had not even batted an eye when she had abruptly changed her major and required an additional two semesters to graduate. Yet he lived as if he were surviving paycheck to paycheck, and so did she.

Derek knew. He had been aware almost from the time he and Caroline had become a serious couple. She had believed that he'd genuinely loved her, and maybe at one point he had. But now she felt she knew the truth. Her father had told her that people treated each other differently when money was involved. As usual, he had been right.

As she climbed out of bed, it occurred to Caroline that she had neglected both feeding herself properly and going by the small grocery store the day before. Looking around her, satisfied with the progress she had made, she resolved to rectify both conditions immediately. With a feeling of rightness, she pulled a t-shirt and a pair of jeans from her old armoire. Eggs, grits, and buttered toast were calling out to her.