The Power Field

Chapter 18

Coming home has always been a real challenge for Caroline Forbes. Of course, she sincerely loves her hometown, daughters, school and friends. But every time she goes back there, she faces a lot of problems that she has to solve alone.

Caroline once thought that the most difficult thing in raising daughters is the first three years of life. But it turned out that the most difficult thing was not to sit at their cradles at night, not to run to the doctors during their regular colds and not even teach them to speak, read and write, the most difficult thing was to adapt them to life, to create conditions that would contribute to their successful adult life. Time passed. So they learned to walk, climb trees, get bad grades and lie unnaturally after another unintentionally stupid offense.

From small and cute babies, they gradually turned into young and pretty girls. As children, Lizzie and Josie, despite the different hair color, were still similar, like most children of their age. But now Caroline could clearly see even the tiniest differences. They dressed, talked, behaved and even positioned themselves in society in completely different ways. And this difference between them made Caroline wonder every time: how could two such dissimilar personalities grow up in the same conditions?

Lizzie is an extremely straightforward girl. She behaves confidently in public, hiding behind the scenes her most important secret, which time after time only becomes harder and more unbearable for everyone who knows about it. In a way, Caroline understands that it was her and Alaric's fault. Perhaps they worried too much about another problem, forgetting about such an important thing as the mental well-being of their daughters. Lizzie was first diagnosed with bipolar disorder at the age of twelve after another outbreak of mania, which cost the school a computer classroom burned to the ground by a powerful fire spell.

A lot has changed in Lizzie's life since then, but she wasn't the only one who faced a new reality at that moment.

It was foolish to think that Josie's mental well-being after SUCH news about her sister's health was less important than Lizzie's mental problems. Focusing their attention around one daughter, they completely forgot about the other, who, like Lizzie, was going through a difficult stage of her life. In fact, they dumped part of the responsibility on the unprepared teenager, which, as it turned out later, affected not only Josie's self-confidence, but also her trusting relationship with her parents.

Time kept going on. And now came the very moment that, it would seem, could change their lives very abruptly, but even then Caroline preferred to crush the problem rather than solve it.

Of course, she couldn't kick Alyssa out of school even if she really wanted to. Their agreement with her aunt would simply not allow this to happen. But probably then it would be better not to ignore or push the problem, but to do at least something. She could have asked Hope what happened that pre-Christmas night... But, alas... The time was lost.

Then Josie accidentally found out about the connection of kindred spirits, about who exactly she, by luck or by the greatest curse, would have to spend the rest of eternity with. She ran away from home, trying to figure out if there was a way to somehow break the bond, and then came back a little different person.

Caroline would be a complete idiot if she really believed her daughter's words that nothing happened there during the escape, that everything was fine with her and that her physical exhaustion and mental instability just came out of nowhere, and were not the result of something more terrible that she was just afraid of talk.

Before leaving for one of her reconnaissance missions, Caroline made sure that, Josie started visiting their psychologist Emma at least once a week. And what was her surprise when she found out that Josie had only come to Miss Tig's office once for a consultation and that she had been constantly skipping classes for the past two weeks. The most unpleasant thing about all this was that Caroline only found out about it when she arrived home.