Chapter 38

Connie

I let the tears fall from my eyes as I waited for Billy and Bob to put me into stasis again.

All I wanted was to go to sleep and wake up when I’m home. To forget about all this, and to go back to my life.

When I got back to the ship, I checked my phone, and saw that my mother had been trying to contact me for days. She needed me.

~Cancer, of all things.~

She said that the doctors would try chemo, but they were not hopeful. I had to go back, to be with her, and to help her.

And I needed to do it as fast as I could. I just hoped I would make it back in time.

I had sixteen months of travel ahead of me, but I couldn’t bear to be on this ship, awake, if I lost yet another person I loved.

Billy came to me and tilted his head to the side. His silent words did nothing to ease my pain. I knew I would never find another man like Raylon. I didn’t want to.

I only spent a few short days with him, but that was all it took for me to fall completely and so deeply in love with him.

I knew there were still a million things I didn’t know about him, and now I never would.

After Laylar was healed, I wanted to go to him, to tell him that I had to go home to help my mother, but he left. He didn’t even say goodbye.

I told the king what happened, hoping that he would relay it to Raylon, but I had to leave.

I ran out of the palace almost as fast as I had run in.

Bob placed the metal headpiece on me, and as I felt it roll into my hair, I closed my eyes, and the darkness took me.

***

When I woke up, I felt weak and groggy. Billy and Bob stood over me, and as I tried to move my feet off the bed, they stopped me.

“No, Connie, you must rest. Your body is weak.”

I relaxed back on the bed and turned my head to the side. I saw my phone and tried to reach it.

Bob took my hand and moved it back to the bed, saying, “Rest.”

“I have to know if my mom is still okay.”

“She is still alive. The disease has not taken her yet, but she is very ill. Too ill for us to help her. I am sorry, Connie.”

I shut my eyes and let the sobs take me into a dreamless sleep.

After three days of waiting, I finally felt strong enough to return to my planet. Billy and Bob couldn’t offer much besides putting me where they found me.

I gathered all my stuff into the backpack I had made for the market, and with one final look around the room, I turned to leave.

I made my way to the bridge to find my friends.

They waited for me at the entrance and after one final glance, I felt a cold rush over my body. Then a sudden flash of light had me back on the small country road in the Lake District.

I looked up at the sky and watched a small spot of light moving slowly, then shoot off into the darkness.

~That’s it. Now you really are alone. This is what you wanted. To come home.~

I reached for my phone in my pocket and dialed my mother.

When she answered, her voice sounded weak and strained. “Hello?”

“Hey, Mom.”

“Connie? Oh Connie, thank goodness it’s you,” she said before a fit of coughs took her voice away.

“I’m on my way, mom,” I said as I looked around. Just then, I realized I didn’t have a penny to my name.

“Mom, can you buy me a train ticket?”

***

Summer passed in London. I spent every day with my mother, helping her. Taking her to the doctors, and just being there. I needed her as much as she needed me.

My heart still ached to be with Raylon. I thought about him every day and cried myself to sleep almost every night.

Autumn was the hardest. I buried my mother next to my father in a small cemetery not far from her home.

After clearing out her house, selling what I could, and finalizing everything with her estate, I took her car, packed my bags, and drove back up to Windermere.

I found a job in a local bottle store, and with the little bit of money my mother left me, I rented the tiny one-bedroom apartment above the shop.

As winter set in, I filled my days working in the shop with Ashley, the owner, and thing nights by binge-watching Netflix.

I had no desire to go out, even though Ash had begged me almost every weekend.

I still missed him. I thought of him often, but it didn’t hurt so much anymore.

What hurt the most was that I couldn’t tell Ash about him. Not without sounding crazy. She knew some of the story, but not all of it.

Ash and I had become instant best friends, and I loved her company. She always made me feel better, and she could make me laugh at least once a day.

I could now think of him and smile, rather than get the lump in my throat like I did for months after I came back.

As spring began to creep in, I had finally found a rhythm in my life again. I worked every day. I didn’t want a day off.

I enjoyed hanging out in the shop with Ash, and if I had too much free time, I only spent it thinking about what could have been.

All the trinkets I bought from the market in the kingdom were arranged around my little place. Looking at them made my heart swell.

At least I had had something so powerful, that I could still feel it now.

Ash was one of the most easy-going, and fun people I had ever met. Her paper-white hair suited her nickname.

As she owned the store I worked in, we sometimes had a drink after closing time in the storeroom, talking about life.

She was divorced from her bastard of a husband for six years now. His idea of a fun night was getting drunk and beating the shit out of her.

She was a pretty woman in her mid-thirties. After her father died and left her this store, she finally stood up for herself and left her husband.

Now she spends most of her time either in the store, or out on the weekends having fun.

As the small town of Windermere began to flood with tourists for the summer, our shop began to see more unfamiliar faces.

Nigel, the seventy-year-old man who lived next door to the shop, was still a regular, but more and more young faces smiled at us.

I came into work on a scorching hot day in the middle of summer and greeted Ash behind the counter.

She smiled and waved as she counted the bills for the till. I made my way to the back of the shop and began unpacking boxes, placing bottles onto the shelves.

The chime above the door rang out, and I heard Nigel’s crackly voice as he greeted Ash.

“Morning, Nigel,” I shouted from the back of the shop and smiled when he shouted a greeting back to me.

I knelt on the tiles and pulled a box of whiskey bottles toward me as the door chimed again.

I heard Ash speaking to someone, then the door chimed again. She came over to me, and said, “Hey Con, some guy was just in here looking for you.

“I told him you were in the back, but he just left.”

“Some guy? Who?”

“I don’t know,” she said as she looked back at the door. “But he kinda looked like a cop.”