Threading the Wrong Needle | Twilight [2]

cinq

Rochester, New York, 1970

The town was dreadfully quiet, painfully so as the late hours of the night crept steadily on, but the whispered argument of their average home caused her ears to ring and her voice to growing hoarse as though she had been screaming to the heavens.

It was like drowning all over again with limbs that seized, betraying her, and lungs that protested each and every breath.

She couldn't remember ever quite feeling this way, not as she did now as though her heart had shattered in her chest, the pieces crumbling until they were only an indistinguishable mess that was everything she was and everything she could be.

Estelle had felt the pangs of heartbreak once before, only once, two years earlier, in a southern village by a country boy that promised her the moon and the sun. The kind of striking boy that brought her pretty flowers and called her sweet names, who wasn't afraid to whisper kind words in her ear. She felt as if she could have married him, could have left behind her to never see her again if it meant she could always love this boy.

He said he was going to marry her. He said he was going to marry a lot of girls.

The day she had seen him, pressed up against a girl with flushed cheeks hidden behind smears of dirt purposely left behind by the trail of her fingers, Estelle had thought she was drowning, hallucinating a world that didn't truly exist, living a burning nightmare.

Maman found her curled up against their secret tree hours later, sobbing into her knees with eyes too sore to produce any more tears.

This still didn't hurt as much as the vacant look in her maman's eyes when she said that they were leaving her.

Leaving her because it was Estelle's turn to live her life truly instead of chasing shadows behind her mama and uncle. Estelle was terrible enough to know that she would never allow that much to happen. 

When the letter had come in addressed to her, requesting the presence of Marion's Daughter, she was sure to admit that she was quick to up and rush to Vera's side at once. Her family was not so concerned with her ability to care for herself anymore out in the world, only sinerilyh feeling the absence of their distance while apart. 

There wasn't any way she could have stifled her sharp intake no matter how much she had mentally prepared herself for this moment. How quickly could time have passed since she had last been to Rochester?

Pretty, caring, motherly eyes were perhaps the only thing left unchanged. The only thing that Estelle could recognize of Vera upon first glance. The woman had aged gracefully, her face becoming elegant with age, the wrinkle lines that carried through showed only the signs of a happy life.

When Estelle had received a letter from Vera, one that was few and far in between, as she had never been as close to the woman as her maman had ever been, she had been more than curious to visit the old neighbourhood where they had lived for a handful of moments compared the existence that she had kept.

Much had changed, yet all was startingly the same to Estelle.

Vera was now a grandmother, that much she knew before her arrival. Maman was fiercely proud of the happy life that her friend had lived, of the legacy that she had cultivated for herself in the form of her family.

The money that the Dupuis had left the little family, the house that they had gifted, had done them well as their wealth showed long after the family last had any true influence on them.

"Marion had warned that you would all look much the same, but I didn't think you would be unchanged," Vera says the words kindly, without any judgment.