And so the experiment continues with Part 2. Part one ran for the first half of the year, but when the storyline ended and the draft was finished, I started a Part 2, a second story i wouldn’t mind working on. Not sure if it can be finished by the end of the year, but I am going to try.
Day 6: She could see it on his face.
She could see it on his face. He thought that now the pardon came through. Now that no one was hunting her, Anna would just go back and resume her past life as though nothing happened. She remembered the looks on the faces of those she thought were friends. She thought about how had she worked to stay ahead of those who wanted her to die.
Was there a way back from that?
She was not the same person she was when she left. Even if she went back, her old life would not fit her the way it once did. ‘And I certainly wouldn’t trust the way I once had.’
She could imagine saying such things to Marcus and she knew that he would just accuse her of holding a grudge. Anna thought about it as she sipped her coffee. It was true, there was some resentment in the way she was treated, there was some residual anger at those who betrayed her. But the truth was simply that she was a different person now.
Staying alive changed her.
Anna looked at the pages before her and slowly read through them, taking in the details before her. She wasn’t just being pardoned. Everything that they took from her was being returned. The family lands, the business holdings, the bank accounts.
‘All the physical things,’ she wasn’t sure how to tell them they took more than the physical. Anna smiled to herself. She was certain if it was pointed out they would simply tack on an inconvenience payment to make it up to her. ‘And they would think the money fixed it,’ she reminded herself. They generally believed money fixed everything.
Anna shook her head as she came across the very fee she thought about. ‘Conscience salved,’ she thought. As she continued through the document, Anna wondered who thought off adding the extra fee for the trouble they caused her. ‘Who feels guilty?’
She wondered. Anna took a sip of her coffee and then put the cup down. She folded the pages back up, slipped them into the envelope and took out a plastic reusable envelope from her bag. At the moment she was keeping photocopies of one of the documents she found elsewhere. She planned to spend today comparing the wording to a passage in one of the archival documents.
Long ago she spelled the envelope so that any tracker placed on a document would be destroyed. The spell was a back up and while she occasionally used it just to make certain she didn’t take any trackers home with her, she had not seen it activated. No one got that close.
She slipped the envelope inside and heard the slight buzzing of active magic. For a second lights crawled over the envelope before they fizzed out. The buzzing stopped. The tracker spell was destroyed. Anna shook her head.
Ten til Midnight 