Abilities

Epilogue

     Lea looked around her again, desperately searching for some eyes on her. No one in the coffee shop was staring, but she couldn’t help feeling that they were. Even though it had been two weeks, she was still embarrassed. She had run through the streets in a hospital gown with blood in her hair, harassing strangers for help. She didn’t blame them for putting her down as an escaped mental patient; she would have done the same. She hadn’t cared though, she had been too desperate. Desperate to find somebody to help, desperate to bring down the organisation that had robbed her of her fiancé.

     And yet, now that she had achieved that- now that the whole thing had been stopped, all the victims had been given their lives back and the people responsible put away for good- she felt so incredibly empty. Stopping the O.A.R. hadn’t changed the fact that Mark was dead.

     She was finding it hard adjusting to being back in the world. Apparently she had been gone five whole years. Her family was overjoyed to have her back, they had presumed she was dead. They had thought Mark was dead too.

     ‘He only disappeared a year ago,’ her mother had explained. ‘But from the moment you went missing he was different. He spent all his time doing “work”, and we rarely saw him. He must have been gathering information all those years. When he did go, we presumed he’d committed suicide or something. We knew he was badly depressed without you.

     ‘What I don’t understand is why he had to go in to get you out, he could have just told the police and brought down the whole operation without involving himself in it.’

     ‘He wanted to come and save me himself,’ Lea had told her. ‘He wanted to be my knight in shining armour.’  Nobody had understood.

     She was absorbed in her thoughts and didn’t even notice the woman approach her table. ‘Lea?’ she said.

     Lea jerked her eyes away from the coffee mug in her hands and looked at the woman in front of her. She was tall and slender and looked like a businesswoman. She had brown hair pulled back into a bun and her blue eyes were brought to life by her rosy complexion.

     ‘Fiona?’ Lea asked, completely astounded. She couldn’t help herself, she jumped out of her seat to give Fiona a hug. ‘Wow, Fiona, it was you that asked me to meet you here? I presumed it was another journalist wanting an interview.’

     ‘Oh Lea, I cannot believe what you did,’ Fiona told her, sitting down at the table. ‘That was so brave of you.’

     ‘But-‘ Lea was grinning broadly. She was happier to see Fiona than she had been since she got out. ‘How did you get out?’

     Fiona’s smile faltered a little. ‘It was kind of selfish,’ she murmured. ‘I wanted to take you with me, but I knew you wouldn’t believe me. I figured it all out. I don’t know how, it just came to me. So I got myself taken, then I got out of there. I was luckier than you with that, I found a route that didn’t involve going through the Organisation Department. I slipped away without anyone noticing.’

     ‘So I take it you’ve been reading the newspapers, if you know all the details about our- about my escape,’ Lea said.

     ‘Yes, I couldn’t believe it when I saw your face on the newspaper. I feel awful that I never went to the police to try and save all the other people involved, but they didn’t know I’d escaped; I wanted to keep it that way. I was terrified.’

          Lea shook her head and sighed gently. ‘I don’t blame you. The only thing that kept me going once I was out of the hospital was that if I got to the police soon enough and got back to the building, then maybe, just maybe, Mark might have still been alive. I knew the chances were slim, but I had to try.’

     The two women stared at each other in amazement. They had never seen each other in real life and it was a lot to take in.

     ‘How come you’re so…’ Lea searched for the right word. ‘Different in real life?’

     ‘You mean confident?’ Fiona asked. ‘Well it was my instinct to shy away from people, it always has been. But I never had that with you. I’m trying to be confident now because I lost years of my life in… that place. I don’t want to miss out on anything because I was too shy to ask. I dunno, is that stupid?’

     Lea grinned. This woman was the only person in the world who understood what she had been through. They would have to help each other.

     ‘It’s not stupid at all.’