"It was pure luck, really, that this hadn't happened sooner. Two years of keeping out of his reach had really been testing the limits of fate, and the sane voice inside her head kept telling her she would have to face him eventually. The world was b...
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Five Years Ago
Sanem strolled along the path leading from the docks back to the village as she headed home at a lazy pace. The evening sun was still pleasantly warm against her skin. Patches of grey clouds hung in the distance - the rain had kept away despite their best threats.
It had been a good day. She'd had so few of those recently, amongst her mother's patronising lectures, the heavy weight of her father's disappointed eyes and the entirely unfair lack of support from her recently-wedded sister, she'd really needed to get away from it all. The six new additions to her sketchbook were surely worth the bombardment of shouting she was going to face when she returned home.
The book sat in her leather shoulder bag, filled with sketches of almost every type of winged creature she had ever seen, nestled in amongst an open letter and the groceries her mother had sent her to fetch that morning. It should have only been a seven-minute walk - somehow, it had turned into seven hours.
The letter contained the most recent reply from Sinan, that she had collected from the old post office in town after visiting the farmers market. She missed her friend. Missed the carefree days they'd spent as children together, running through the golden fields his parents had owned, playing games and pretending their divided futures didn't exist. It had all been so peaceful.
His leaving had torn an aching hole in her life, a hole she'd never really been able to fill again. He was in the city now - with friends his family actually approved of and a fiance they adored, studying at some university Sanem couldn't even pronounce. He still kept in contact, and for that she was grateful. Often eager to share what he'd learned, she had, on occasion, sent him some of her bird drawings, and he would reply with everything he knew about the species, or, when in doubt, everything he could find out. The names, both in her common tongue and in unfamiliar Latin, that had eventually become familiar even to the uneducated daughter of a baker.
The most recent letter had made her heart swell, he'd offered a proposal - for once, one she was actually happy to receive.
He wanted to publish a book, 'A Biologist's Guide To Birds', (the title seemed a bit ostentatious to Sanem) but his attempts to add annotations had fallen short of messy scribbles resembling those made by the hands of a three-year-old. Sanem's drawings were far more delicate and he had offered her royalties in exchange for the rights to use them in his publishing. She'd been giddy about it all day.
Despite the good news, the weight that had been saddled over her shoulders for the last few months began to return as the house came into view, along with the nagging feeling that she had forgotten something off her mother's list.
The house was old. Tired, cobbled walls held together by wooden beams and the staunch determination of her parent's marriage that was only a few years older than the building itself. It sat on the outskirts of the little village Sanem had grown up in and neighboring fields that rolled onto green farmland beyond.
