Hidden in the Sun

Prequel

*You do not have to read this little chapter... If you get bored, just skip to chapter 5 and come back later. This is just a little background. XO
                          -Audrey Marie

It's absolutely astonishing how little control we have over our own fates. It doesn't matter which choices we struggle over, which roads we take, which people we decide to be nice to, whether we take the stairs or the elevator... There is always an "if" factor.

If Elizabeth wouldn't have signed the papers before giving birth, she would have realized that she actually did want the gentle blue-eyed child who would be abused by his first foster family. If Justin had just taken the stairs, then he wouldn't have been stuck on an elevator for 4 hours missing a perfect date while waiting for the service man to fix it. And if Clare Marie Frank had replaced her tires before the big freeze, then her right back wheel wouldn't have locked up at the intersection between 6th Street and Fairmont when she tried to stop too fast at a red light. She wouldn't have slide across an ice patch at a speed of 50 MPH that had frozen over a pothole on a road that the mayor had scheduled to have repaved the very next day.

If she had taken her brothers advice about her wheels, she wouldn't have spun out of control hitting a burgundy Mazda at just the right momentum; that momentum wouldn't have killed a man in his early forties on impact, her car wouldn't have slammed the other into a light pole killing the woman in her late thirties 20 minutes later due to extensive brain hemorrhaging and blood loss. The 8-year-old little girl sitting on the left side wouldn't have been catapulted from the car because she once again took her seatbelt off to retrieve her Barbie that had slipped under the front seat, and the 17-year-old on the right wouldn't be left an orphan within a single hour.

Yes, it is absolutely astonishing how little control we have over our own fates; how one single person's decisions could affect that of an entire family. If Clare had thought twice, they wouldn't have wrecked in the bad part of the city, and the massive amount of blood wouldn't have attracted a few rouge vampires, those vampires who had slipped to level E; not a humane thought in their minds except for their incessant lust for blood.

If Clair had thought twice... that little girl might have had a chance before being murdered while calling out for "mommy" who was suffering the same fate. The only thing protecting the other girl being a near perfect cocoon of bent and twisted metal, a piece of which stabbed painfully in her shoulder.

If Clair Marie Frank had just listened, then that family would be sitting dully through another of Aunt Cindy's Winter Gatherings happy still, just to be around family. If she had just thought, then I wouldn't have to write about this in third person as if I wasn't there. I wouldn't be deeply afraid of Vampires and my winters wouldn't be tainted in so much blood... I would still have a family.