"When she gathered control of her
emotions, Rebecca looked out the window where she could barely see the tall
spire of Westminster outside her window.
She heard noise from the traffic below, several floors down from her
flat. For a few moments, she let her
mind wander back to the days when she and Cor were dating. It seemed so very hard for her to imagine
that those days would end up with her facing an empty future. Empty of that one person who would take care
of her and assure her of a secure life.
#
Rebecca realized that she was still
online, so she clicked on the 'send' button to let her Mother know she was okay
and shut down her laptop. Neither she
nor her mother, Sophia Bartholomew, liked snail mail. Rebecca wrote letters as a rule, but the distance
between Connecticut and London was considerable, and she wanted to keep her
parents up on her latest adventures.
It wasn't always that way. Her father, Leo Bartholomew, was the famous
Heart Surgeon at Yale-New Haven Hospital. Many foreign medical institutions
wooed him to come and speak at their conferences, so he was always
traveling. Leo and Rebecca had a special
bond that her mother Sophia supported wholeheartedly. Rebecca was Daddy’s girl. This bond was a bit rocky nowadays since she
and Cor had eloped.
It was a sad memory when her mother
watched her leave with a suitcase in hand to elope with Cor. Rebecca avoided a showdown with her father
and left her mother to cope with the fallout.
Sophia had to break the news of Rebecca's elopement to Leo, who took it
with no visible emotion.
It was at that moment that Rebecca
heard a commotion outside her door. She
felt surprised, then from the chatter outside her door, gathered that it was
her next-door neighbors who came in early from their night shift. Elena, her roommate, told her about
them. "They are nurses, come from
Colombia, and they work the night shift."
Elena, her sophisticated manner apparent in her shrug, smiled without
mirth. "They always wake me up, and
it's boring really."
After Cor’s phone call, Rebecca forced
herself to look forward to being an independent woman in London. Her instincts told her that this was not a
wise decision. So many unsettling events
were happening there – the terrorist attacks, the bombings, the waves of
unhappy demonstrators making their voices heard about Brexit and then here she
was, in the midst of it, and she felt as though she was in a dicey
situation. She desperately felt alone at
that instant.
As if to avoid the dire picture of her
chosen place of residence – London - she flung on a jacket and slipped on boots
and fled out the door."
(c) Copyright Mary Faderan 2019
Those who wish to buy this book please click here.
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