Hunting the Fairy Tale

Chapter 125 - Drowning Sorrows

Becca

"I met Hunter on this very bench," Beth smiles, her eyes misty with memories I have only experienced via her narratives through the years. "It's the same bench where Willow would sit and read less than a year before him. Remember that?" she laughs affectionately. "She could barely read, but she always had a pile of books with her. She loved looking at the pictures, trying to sound the words... so cute..."

Of course, I remember sitting in the apartment window, enjoying the late afternoon sun, watching Willow sit on this bench. Sometimes, she would get up in short bursts of energy and play on the playground equipment. If Ronan and/or Candice Swift showed up, she would have a blast with them until they got called in for dinner. It feels unreal to be sitting on this bench in the courtyard garden again after so many years.

When Willow and I left Briar Cove, Beth took over our lease and moved into our apartment in the complex across the street from the Swift building. The ground-floor apartment was really too big for a single woman, but she said it was full of fond memories, filling up all the empty spaces. Most of our furniture remained, and she could hear and see us in every room. 

Actually, that is the same reason why I have never been here since the day I left. Whenever I managed to visit Briar Cove, Beth and I always met up at my parents' place; I could not bring myself to return to the home I shared with Grayson and Willow. The memories made it impossible for me to stay strong and move on.

Even now, sitting here with the cool breeze playing in my hair, I am filled with such desperate longing for Grayson, the husband I lost so soon and so unfairly, I can barely breathe.

He was a brilliant businessman and used his expensive degree to establish a chain of pubs in Grey Mount, but his firstborn, the pub in Thunder Ridge he battled to get off the ground when I first met him, always remained his favourite.

We moved to Briar Cove the year before he died. He'd decided to take a back seat in the day-to-day running of the Grey Mount pubs and just focus on the business end of the chain while he ran the one in Thunder Ridge himself.

He'd gone to Grey Mount to have his bi-weekly meeting with the managers there when he died, and my life as I knew it was destroyed. I fell apart completely. I even quit my job at the small engineering firm in Thunder Ridge and went into hiding at my parents's house. Beth took leave from the awful company where she worked as an accountant to support me through the hell I was in.

And then Charlotte showed up.

"She was heartbroken, you know?" I tell Beth, and she nods slowly, her eyes still tracing the outlines of the slides and swingsets not far from where we're sitting on the bench that has played such a huge part in our children's lives many years ago. I think some of the equipment has changed since then. The remaining ones seem freshly painted in blues and greens with splashes of red and yellow. I remember them as mostly red and yellow back then.

"Of course she was; she loved her daddy," Beth agrees, her voice sounding swollen and stressed.

"I mean Charlotte," I clarify, realizing that my mind has strayed from Beth's last topic while hers stayed behind. "I often saw her sitting in the dark, just staring out the windows or hugging the portraits of her children, letting the tears run down her cheeks. She only did that when she thought nobody was around, so I couldn't even go to her and comfort her."

"That is horrible," Beth says, brushing away a stray tear of her own. "She lost both her children in such quick succession. Who can handle that?"

We sit in silence for a while. Our tears have dried up, and we are no longer in danger of being mistaken for two soppy drunks blubbering in the children's play area.