Topic: Fortitude

Piper Granger

Date: 2012-04-25 09:16 EST
((Runs with Ollie's thread, Hubris.)) ________________________

My father has a charming little phrase he trots out when people start getting him down. Life is like a sewer; what you get out of it depends on what you put into it. It used to make me laugh to hear him say that, to see my mother's eyes roll with long-suffering resignation, and hear my sister sniff as though she'd been personally insulted. I was the carefree one in our family. Now, I think the more appropriate word would be careworn.

I have so much to be thankful for, though. A year ago, I'd been jilted at the altar, I was in a new world, I'd just found out I was pregnant, and I was being courted by four different men in answer to an advertisement I'd put up on the spur of the moment. Ollie was one of those men, and I count myself so lucky to have met him. He completely changed my life - he gave me his name, his love, a safe place to live and bear my child. He even accepted my love, which has always been poison to any other man who has taken it.

We'd been married less than a year when I began to notice something wasn't quite right with my husband. He'd been neglecting his art since Lyneth was born, but that was mostly due to the fact that she'd wrapped her little fingers around his heart from the moment he laid his eyes on her. And she adored him. It didn't matter that he wasn't her biological father; that she was a completely different race to both her parents. Ollie was the centre of her world, and though I probably should have felt jealous of that, I just couldn't. No one who saw them together could have been anything but enchanted.

I can't say when things started to change. It could have been when Ollie bought his studio space and moved all his artistic belongings out. It could have been before that, when having a newborn, a parrot, and a hyperactive dog cut so drastically into our time together that we almost didn't speak for three months. Yet despite that, he was still here, and we still had something to share. It was the absences I noticed first.

Even if he was completely in the zone, utterly unaware of anyone or anything but his canvas, Ollie exuded a confident warmth that filled the loft where we lived. That warmth was gone, and I didn't know why or how to get it back. Lynnie pined for him, refusing to smile or play, often just staring at the sunny corner where he'd used to set up his canvas. I could almost see her willing him to return. And when he come home, he seemed too tired for her, only just able to lift a smile when she called to him. We were both lucky she was so young; though I could see it hurt her, she soon gave up trying to wheedle her father out of himself, transferring the majority of her affectionate sweetness to me for lack of anyone else to love.

Yes, she was lucky to be so young, so easily guided over the heartache of not knowing whether or not we were losing the central force in our lives. I was pining, too. I missed the little things; the companionable silence after Lynnie had gone to bed, the hours where Ollie would paint and I would write; the laughter and smiles; the chaos that was taking Loki for a walk in those days. Of course I missed the intimacy, the loving side of his nature, but what frightened me most was how easy he found it to leave us. He'd stay for a night, perhaps, sometimes only a few hours - long enough to eat something if it was ready, and shower - and then he would be gone again.

But I stayed hopeful. I knew it was my impatience, my temper, that had poisoned my relationship with Terence, driven him to someone else's bed. I didn't want to do that to Ollie. So I stayed quiet and patient, and hoped alongside my daughter that something would bring our husband and father back to us. Soon.

Piper Granger

Date: 2012-05-24 08:13 EST
I should probably have known something was wrong. I see that now, in hindsight. But after months of being neglected, of being virtually a single parent to a baby girl entirely too precocious for the uninitiated to keep up with, I was just so relieved and pleased to have my Ollie back that I closed my eyes and ears to the details that didn't quite fit.

He was home. He was the husband I'd hoped for, the father Lynnie so desperately wanted. I still had my moments of jealousy, of course. With Ollie home again, I was once more secondary in my daughter's eyes, almost the whole of her loving attention turned to the man who had taken us on and chosen to be her father. And if their relationship seemed different this time, I didn't pay it so much mind. I was so determined not to drive him away again; I didn't let myself think over the suspicious way they looked at one another, or the feeling sometimes that they were somehow conversing without words. They didn't mean to leave me out of their games, I told myself. I was just being silly with those occasional flares of resentment against the feeling of being the odd one out.

In retrospect, I should have paid closer attention to Poppy and Loki. The parrot, in particular, was deeply suspicious of her master. She wouldn't eat while he was in the same room, nor would she be caged while he was in the loft. I had no control over her at all, and even Loki seemed rebellious when I disciplined him for growling at my husband. I feel so foolish now for not seeing what they saw.

Yet I cannot be held entirely to blame, I know. The human mind is masterful at only seeing what it wants to see, only accepting what it wants to accept. I turned a blind eye to so much during those months, and even when my suspicions were roused, all it took was a kiss, a touch, a smile ....and I forgot those suspicions, buoyant and basking in the attention of the man I loved.

After all, when the alternative is to be left to raise a child whose speedy development scares you, and loneliness that bites deep into a place already raw from rejection, who wouldn't ignore a little oddness not to be alone again?

Piper Granger

Date: 2012-06-04 11:30 EST
((A Cousin's Concerns))

It was Jon who burst my bubble, who brought all the little oddities and differences out from behind the wall where I had hidden them and made me pay attention. I could almost wish that he hadn't; until that conversation, I had been able to ignore the strangeness in my husband. After Jon left, I couldn't stop thinking about it.

And of course, my mind flashed straight to the one terrifying conclusion that was utterly beyond any of us to prevent - that if Ollie was not Ollie, if he was being controlled or possessed by some creature, then it must be Lyneth's biological father, the Fae who had impregnated me over a year before. That thought truly terrified me. I had spent all that time during my pregnancy with research and finding practical ways to keep my daughter protected from the searching, grasping hands of the Fae who would want to take her away from me; even Alaric, Ollie's own cousin, had helped, his friends at his school making the blessed iron bells and charmed mobile that decorated Lyneth's crib. Why had I gone through all that, only to fail now" How could I have been so stupid as to have ignored all the signs that my husband was no longer the man I married"

I hated, too, that underneath the fear was that jealousy still, made worse by the thought that it wasn't even Ollie Lynnie preferred now. It was something we didn't know. Something powerful enough to take over my husband, something powerful enough to dismiss all the protections that lay about the loft. Something that spent almost every waking moment with my daughter, teaching her God alone knew what. How could I protect her against that' Would she even allow me to' For all I knew, she had already been taken, and the child who now barely even gave me the time of day was one of the Changelings Riley Lo had warned me about all those months ago.

Do you have any idea how difficult it is to sleep, when you have no idea what is lying in the bed beside you? When you know that it cannot be the man you've bound your life to' When your dog, and even his parrot, refuse to be in the same room with him, unless it is to protect the baby in some way"

I will tell you. It is close to impossible. I became insomniac overnight, not daring to close my eyes for more than an hour, paranoid and hyper-alert to every sound or movement beside me in the bed, acutely aware of my daughter in the crib not so far away. Dark circles bruised the skin under my eyes, my moods darkened. All of a sudden, it felt as though I were in the grip of post-natal depression again, constantly watchful, wary, always seeming to be hovering between anger and tears. And I knew, I knew, that this was just going to make things worse; that Lyneth and her playmate in Ollie's body would know something was wrong. And that, in turn, hurt me more.

The only comfort was in Loki, my big protective Malamute, who seemed to recognise that I was suddenly so very afraid. He took to shadowing me, just as I was shadowing Ollie; never allowing me to be alone with the creature impersonating my husband, just as I never allowed Lyneth to be alone with him.

I thought I was succeeding, though. I thought I might have managed to conquer my moods enough that the suspicion would go away, that I could pass for behaving normally once again. But how do you go on as normal, when fear and worry are never far from your heart and mind"

Piper Granger

Date: 2012-09-22 17:02 EST
It's strange, how the human mind learns to protect itself over time. If I had spent those carefree months worrying and frightened, I would have driven myself completely mad. As it was, I resigned myself to worrying only when Lyneth was alone with this being who may or may not have been my husband. When he was with me, I found myself laughing more than I had done before, fully enjoying his company without reserve. Who wouldn't, in such a circumstance, stoop to revelling in that happiness, rather than working against it to cover themselves in sorrow"

I know now that I was only fooling myself to ever have believed that Ollie - the thing with Ollie's face - cared even a whit about me. If he had, he would have warned me of what was coming, he would have allowed me to try and shield my daughter - my daughter - from the pain that inevitably fell on her. Though barely a year old, Lyneth was not human, not entirely. She was a Fae child, at the mercy of very human emotions. I maintain, and I always shall, that it was cruel of that visiting being to bind her to him so tightly.

But I am not entirely without blame, I know that. I should have stayed vigilant. I shouldn't have let him take Lyneth away from me. I shouldn't have fooled myself into thinking that everything was well, when it clearly was not.

The reminder, when it came, was like a slap in the face. Almost overnight, he became withdrawn once again, but this time, he took my little girl with him. I ceased to have any function in my own family, slowly becoming afraid of the bond between my daughter and the being who masqueraded as my husband. I couldn't break into it; I had no place there. I lost count of the number of nights I fell asleep in tears, wishing for the carefree summer and the pretense that someone loved me. I had thought that the pain of being jilted at the altar was the worst I would ever feel. But it didn't even come close to comparing with what I felt during those horrific weeks. I was completely isolated, cut off from everything familiar.

Lyneth, the reason I had come to Rhy'Din in the first place, didn't seem to know I existed anymore. I had abandoned my home, my family, to see her safe and well even before she was born. I had sacrificed my freedom to give her a married name, to protect her from the stigma of being a child born to a single mother. I had fallen for the man who had given me his name, and he had abandoned me, sending back in his place this thing that cared only for his own ends and pleasures. I had nothing, and there was nothing I could do to change that. I was alone and unloved, and falling swiftly out of love with the husband I had thought was my saving grace. I had never really known the meaning of the word misery until then.

I remember that last week painfully. The night that thing made love to me, forcing myself to respond, too frightened of what it might do if it didn't get what it wanted. And then the silence of the days that followed. Thanks to that systematic shutting out, Lyneth didn't speak to me. She didn't look at me. My own daughter, the baby girl I had given everything up for, had no use for me, spending hours just watching the front door. And when the thing wearing Ollie's face came back to eat and sleep, even though it ignored her, she would kick up the most enormous fuss just to be left alone to sit or lie with it. She wanted to be with that creature, no matter what I did.

When, at last, it ceased to come back to the loft, when it seemed as though whatever presence had infected our lives had gone, I felt no urge to seek it out. No relief, no concern, no worry for the husband that had left me. I felt anger. No, not anger. Fury. Incandescent rage. How dare he treat me like this" How dare he turn my daughter, the only person in this whole place I had any true connection with, against me" What gave him the right to come and go as he pleased, leaving me in this mess"

What was I supposed to do' I had to care for Lyneth, though she barely even acknowledged my presence any longer. But I refused to do that in the home I had tried to make with my husband and daughter. Angry, hurt, isolated beyond anything I had ever felt before, I began to make arrangements that would keep that creature or the husband who had left us alone from ever being able to simply walk back into our lives again. I filed for an annulment of our marriage, and I began to seek out a new place to live, somewhere Oliver Hudson Granger the Third or his strange, cruel doppleganger would never think to look for us.

And that night, when I curled up in my bed and began to sob, feeling more alone than I had ever even considered it was possible to feel ....I felt a tiny hand on my face, and the overwhelming love of my daughter sweep over me, just as it had on the day she was born. Looking up, I found her lying on the bed beside me, those deep turquoise eyes wet with her own tears, her small face crumpled with the sense of loss that premeated the loft. I opened my arms, and my little Lyneth curled into me, her tears mingling with my own. It was not, perhaps, the loving embrace for which I had been longing for weeks, but it was a start.

Perhaps now, without Ollie or the creature who thought it was Ollie to distract us, we would be able to build a life together, just myself and my daughter. And damn to hell Oliver Granger for leaving us like this.

Piper Granger

Date: 2012-09-28 13:53 EST
I am proud of the way I handled things in the days following that not-Oliver's departure. Two years before, when abandoned and humiliated, I had curled in on myself and my mother had had to bodily pull me out of the depths of my despair. This time, though, I had Lyneth to think about, and that protective, maternal instinct that had taken so long to make itself known following her birth urged me into action.

I have never been a strong person, I know this. I bend with the wind and I always fold when someone puts pressure on me. If I had been a strong person, I would never have met Oliver Granger, and I would never have suffered those long summer months pretending that the man in my bed was my husband. I had failed badly in protecting my daughter; well, I wasn't going to fail this time.

Within a week of that thing's departure from the loft I shared with Oliver and Lyneth, I had applied for an annulment, both with the Governor's Office and with the Catholic Church here on Rhy'Din. I was completely honest with them about my reasons for marrying in the first place, and since there was no husband present - or readily available - to dispute my application, I was assured that there was little reason why my application would be refused. It would, of course, take several months to process and make official, but since I had no pressing desire to get married ever again, I did not mind. I was angry and hurt and I knew I would never forgive Oliver Hudson Granger the Third for abandoning us to some Fae creature who had tried to steal my daughter's love away from me. I wanted nothing more to do with him, whether he returned or not.

The next thing I did was significantly more difficult. I called my parents. My father, predictably enough, began to make sweeping threats concerning Oliver's ever increasing chances of having to walk around in traction for the rest of his life, but my mother surprised me. She didn't lecture, she didn't say "I told you so" - though I knew that was exactly what she was thinking. She just listened and took in everything I had to say, and asked me what I needed.

I've always known I was lucky, academically, to be a member of the landed gentry; thanks to this epidode, I knew it for a fact. My parents forwarded me the money to buy, outright, a small house on the other side of the city from the loft where we currently lived. Lyneth and I had already visited it with the realtor. It had been one of the first things we did together after we were left all alone in our shared misery, go looking for a new place to live. I cannot express how ecstatic I was when, after barely ten minutes of looking at this little house, my little girl turned around and spoke to me for the first time in months.

"I like this one," she said to me, taking my hand, ignoring the look of utter amazement on the realtor's face. I imagine that even in Rhy'Din a child who is only a year old generally doesn't look around two years old and speak like a adult. But then, Lynnie was special, and I didn't care who thought us oddly matched in that moment, my entire being focused on my daughter, who was giving me her full attention. "Can we live here?"

That sealed it for me, and the day after, I called my parents. The third day, I signed the lease and collected the deeds from the solictor. I was determined to take nothing from the loft that was not exclusively mine, nothing I had not paid for out of my own pocket, which meant that Lyneth and I spent a couple of days wandering in and out of the shops in the Marketplace, choosing furniture and essentials for our new house.

I could never have predicted that something so simple would bring her so much out of her shell around me, but I was grateful for it. It would take time, of course, for us to grow comfortable with one another again, but without Oliver to distract her or that Fae creature to bespell her, we had plenty of time to learn about each other once again. And without that strange sense of oppression the creature had brought with it, the animals perked up. Loki, of course, was coming with us - he was my dog, and Lynnie had a special bond with him.

Poppy, I made other arrangements for. I didn't want Oliver accusing me of stealing or abandoning his pet. I gave Poppy to Kaylee, and swore the girl to secrecy in the same action. She, of course, like the rest of the Grangers, had no idea what had been going on, and I certainly wasn't going to advertise my abandonment. It took a long time, but eventually I extorted from her a promise not to tell her family what had happened. After all, Lola had disappeared without a trace; who was to say that Oliver had not simply gone looking for her without a word"

But we were on course. We had a house waiting for us; a house that Lynnie had taught me how to protect, with rowan and heather and rosemary. We picked out the colours for our new house, we made plans for a herb garden together, we decided what sorts of flowers we would like in our garden. I must admit, I had never thought about flowers with regard to which fairies reside in them before that point, but I trusted my strange, special little girl to guide me in the right direction. I also made the more mundane security arrangements; I didn't want to be supernaturally protected but have an open door for just anyone else to walk in through.

But I still felt a pang when the time came to leave the loft. It had been the scene for so many happy moments in those early months, when I was newly married and still heavily pregnant. It struck me as we were leaving that the only truly happy times I had enjoyed in Oliver's loft were the few visits before we were married, and the two months after, before Lyneth was born, and yet, I knew he had not enjoyed those two months as I had. My temper had made his life miserable.

It was a sad thought, to realise that I truly had been fooling myself. I do not think now that I was ever in love with Oliver Granger. I was in love with what he represented to me, freedom and security, a name for my child, a friend to share her lifetime with. And I do not truly believe he loved me. He adored Lyneth, I am certain of it. It could have been a pleasant life, nonetheless, as friends and lovers, raising this very special little girl together. But we came together out of need, not out of romance or love. He needed someone to need him, and I did need him. And then he let me down.

I was in tears in the taxi as we drove away from the riverside. Yet Lyneth was completely calm, crawling out of her booster seat to curl up in my lap and dry my tears, her touch on my cheek washing that warm blanket of loving adoration through and over me once again, reassuring me that though this part of our lives was over, there was still so much more to enjoy in the weeks, and months, and years to come. And despite the fears and worries and isolation of the past year, we would face those years together, hand in hand, knowing that deep down all we had was each other.

And that was not so lonely a thought as I might first have considered.

Piper Granger

Date: 2012-11-25 00:55 EST
Odd, how time moves on in fits and starts, flying by when you want to savor the moment, crawling along when all you want is the moment to be over. When it comes to legal and religious annulment, both happens at once.

It had been humiliating to go to both interviews - with the judge who was overseeing my civil application, and with the bishop who was overseeing the application to the Catholic Church - and admit that the only reason I had got married in the first place was because I was too scared to be a single mother. The civil judge had been very understanding with me, simply taking the pertinent information and giving me a time frame in which to wait. The bishop ....well, he has a duty laid down by his own vows to lecture me about my bad choices and the future of my daughter. That doesn't mean I was happy to sit there and take it, but I did. I'd made my own bed as far as this was concerned; I had to lie in it and take the scolding.

It helped that by the time the civil hearing came around, Lyneth and I had been living in our new little house for a couple of months. We were friends again, and although I knew she missed Ollie - or rather, the thing that had pretended to be Ollie for the summer - I felt a part of my daughter's life again. She didn't shut me out, or ignore me; she let me be her mother. She was still growing at an amazing rate, but I was constantly reassured by Tamara, my doctor, that this was perfectly natural for a Fae child. Lyn would settle to growing at a normal human rate once she had decided she could do everything she needed to do to be fairly independent around our home. I was just waiting for that to happen - in the space of a single year, my little girl had gone from newborn to physically two years old, and still wasn't content, it seemed.

But we'd settled into our new community with an ease I will always be grateful for. There were other Fae children with human parents who lived around us, meaning Lyn wasn't out of place at her nursery, and she made friends easily, bringing people into my life to be my friends in the form of her friends' parents. The best of these was Florence, or Flo as she preferred to be called - a bright, bubbly woman who had married a half-orc named Kadish after he'd diagnosed her firstborn son as being Fae. She was pregnant with her second child when I met her, and her ever expanding waistline was a source of great interest to her own son, Thom, and Lyneth. But more importantly, Flo and Kadish made us feel welcome in our new neighborhood. We even managed to have a full house for Lyneth's first birthday party!

With Lynnie at nursery for part of the day five days a week, and a quiet, secure home where I felt safe for the first time in months, I was finally able to get down to work, returning to the second draft of the novel I had been working on for over a year. With a little judicious prodding by my agent, a spirited man on Earth who had only taken me on as a favor to my parents in the first place, I got it done, and when the time of the civil annulment hearing came around, I was very nearly a published author - on Earth, anyway.

The little courtroom was almost empty that day - just me and Lyneth, my solicitor, and the judge hearing the case. No one had heard anything from Ollie in months, and though I was doing all I could to separate myself from my estranged husband, I couldn't help a pang of concern for him, hoping he was safe and well, wherever he was. But because he had not contested the application, nor shown up to discuss custody of Lyneth at all, the annulment was a foregone conclusion. The judge freed me from my legal obligation as wife to Oliver Hudson Granger, the Third, and made my physical custody of my daughter legal and binding in the process.

If my solicitor had expected me to rejoice, he was sadly mistaken. It wasn't a happy moment, for me or my little girl. We were still filled with what could have beens, memories of the first months of her lifetime when Ollie had been Ollie and he had been ours. And though I knew I would never forgive him for abandoning us, however it had come about, I wasn't going to poison Lyneth against him. It was up to her to make her own decisions as she grew older. But now she was no longer Lyneth Granger, but Lyneth Davidson. The legal record had been wiped clean.

It would take a while longer for the Catholic Church to decide if they were going to grant me an annulment, of course. And there was every chance they wouldn't. All that meant was that if I got married again - which I seriously doubted was ever going to be even a faint possibility - I would not be able to marry in a Catholic service. I wasn't sure how I felt about that at the time; being single legally but married in the Church was a very strange place to be. Thankfully, Father Hanrahan at my new local church didn't pass any comment on it when I let him know. He seems to understand that life isn't always what you expect.

But I was free, in a way. And though I still worried over him, Ollie couldn't just walk back into my life as though nothing had happened at all, not any more. If he showed up in the future, he would have to make an effort to try again, if he even wanted to. But he had taught me a valuable lesson.

My heart just can't be trusted to make the right decision.

Piper Granger

Date: 2012-12-12 10:45 EST
December 12th, 2012

The day the invitation arrived for the Old Man's Christmas get-together, I realised I hadn't made such a good job of hiding myself. I didn't mind that Humphrey knew where we were; in a way, it was a relief that someone did. What worried me was that if Humphrey knew, he would probably tell Ollie, if he ever came back. If it was Ollie who came back at all. And even if it wasn't, how would Humphrey know" That dear old man would be so relieved to see someone he'd thought lost, I didn't think he'd think twice about sending his however-many-times-removed great-nephew in my direction.

But there were a few things I could do. The first, I did that morning, barely minutes after opening the invitation and making my heart-shuddering realisation. Lyneth was sat at the table, doing weird and wonderful things with her toast - which didn't currently involve eating it, I noticed, but hoped she'd get there before it was time for nursery. She looked up as I sat down next to her, and the cut out pieces of toasted bread lowered themselves demurely back onto her plate as she gave me her full attention.

"Why're you thsad, Mummy?"

I smiled gently. She'd always been able to read my moods, and these past months had brought her closer to me, close enough that even when I tried my best to hide myself from her, she always knew.

"I'm not sad, exactly, Lyn," I told her, reaching out to stroke a wayward lock of hair from her face. "I'm worried. Grampa Granger sent us this invitation for his Christmas party."

She took the brightly festive invitation from my hands, turning it this way and that way as she studied it. Then those beautiful, unnaturally blue eyes looked up at me once again. "Can we go?"

My heart thumped in my chest. It wasn't that I didn't want to go to Maple Grove; I did. I wanted to see the family that had so generously taken me in when I needed them most. I missed the friends I had made among them ....Humphrey, Jon and his wife, Caroline, Gabrielle, and all the others. But I was frightened, too; frightened that Ollie would somehow be there, and that I would have to face a man I had separated myself from in law in his absence. But I couldn't say no to that sweet face, the hopeful smile looking up at me.

"Of course we can go, sweetness," I promised her, and promised myself in the same moment that even if the worst did happen, we could always leave early. I wasn't going to discuss any of what had happened over the spring and summer with anyone, not where she could hear us. She was hurting enough that she had hurt me, however little she had meant to do it. "But that's not what I want to talk to you about."

Her attention, which had naturally begun to wander as I thought over her request, snapped back to me, and I was caught up all over again in the beauty of those eyes, that shining, clear shade of turquoise that always caught me by surprise. She set the invitation aside, giving me her full attention, and I paused, gathering together my thoughts.

Reaching up behind my neck, I untied the leather thong that had resided there for more than a year, pulling a tiny vial of what seemed to be sparkling dust from underneath my top to show her. "Lynnie, do you know what this is?"

She nodded, even without needing to look. I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised. My special little girl knew an awful lot of things I couldn't even begin to fathom, though she usually kept me from knowing just how much she was aware of.

"It'ths a ghaisc"och," she said calmly. My confusion must have shown in my face, for I had never heard the word before, even when the precious little vial had been given into my hands. "A warrior," Lyneth translated for me. "You thsmasth it when you need thsomeone to fight for you."

"Yes." I know my relief showed in my voice and on my face; I really didn't have any idea how you explained the concept to a normal child. But then, a normal child of her age wouldn't have needed to know it. "Lyneth, I want you to have this. It was given to me when I first came to Rhy'Din, when I didn't know about magic and Fae and everything else that comes with it, by an old friend who thought I needed it more than she did. Now I think you need it more than I do."

She was silent as I tied the little vial securely about her neck, one small hand tucking it carefully into her t-shirt as she listened to me. "I want you to promise me that you will use it only if you are in so much danger that you cannot get out of it. It only works once, but if you use it at the right time, it will only need to work once. Do you understand?"

Lyneth studied me for a long moment, her little hand over the small bump on her chest where the vial lay. "I wisth you would keep it," she said finally, but didn't go on when I shook my head, instead changing her direction. "Why?"

I smiled again, gentle and sad. "Because we're not always together," I told her. "You have your nursery, and you visit your friends a lot. It will stop me from worrying so much if you always have it with you." And I know I'm the weak link in our little fortress, I added in the silence of my mind. I want you protected, even when I'm not.

She seemed to understand, probably better than I would have liked her to, and with a brief segue of conversation into something about birds that was almost completely beyond me, our morning resumed its usual course. For her, at least. For myself ....I had a couple of things to do that day that would keep me from my writing. But they had to be done.

The first was, strangely, the hardest. After dropping Lyneth off at her nursery in the Temple District, and making arrangements with the tutors for her to visit the school Rhiannon Brock had told Caroline about a couple of weeks before, I made my way reluctantly to the riverside. To the loft I had shared with Ollie until three months before. Or rather, if I looked at it as objectively as I could ....the loft I had shared with my husband until May, and something that wasn't my husband for the months afterward. Something that had abandoned us just as abruptly as Ollie had, all those months before.

Piper Granger

Date: 2012-12-12 10:46 EST
I still had my keys, letting myself into the space we had shared together. The first thing that caught my attention was a loud squawk from the cage by the door, making me jump and laugh. "Oh, Poppy," I chuckled, lifting the cover to greet the parrot with a smile. The African grey looked me in the eye accusingly, and promptly turned her back on me. I had, after all, given her to Kaylee to look after, wondering now why the bird was back in the loft when it was clearly still unlived in. But it was clean, cleaner than I had been expecting, and I realised that Kaylee must have made her own arrangements before leaving Rhy'Din on her whirlwind tour of America. Someone was coming in to clean the place, sort the mail, and feed Poppy.

But I wasn't here to poke about and be nosy. I sorted through the mail for any that was addressed to me, unsurprised to find a duplicate of the invitation that had arrived at my house that morning on the top of the pile, and set myself to the task I had come to perform. Despite everything, I was still wearing Ollie's rings, the gold wedding band and emerald engagement ring he had given me. It was time to cut those ties, I thought, before anything else could happen to muddy the waters.

I was almost ashamed of how little I felt as I slipped the rings from my finger. My untrustworthy heart had poisoned two men against me, I was sure of it, and though this time had been far more complicated, far more painful than the first, I couldn't dwell on it. I had a daughter to raise as best I could. Very gently, I set the rings in an envelope, along with a note that bore only three words ....I'm sorry. Goodbye ....sealing it, and setting it carefully on one of the abandoned easels by the window.

This time last year, I had been wrapping presents in secret, putting up decorations in that very room, excited and determined to make my first Christmas with Ollie and Lyneth mean something. But it had been shortly after that when Ollie had begun drinking, staying away, sleeping at the studio. When he had lost interest in his new family, and abandoned us to the thing that had taken on his shape. Our first Christmas had meant something. It had meant we were over before we began.

Drawing myself out of my melancholy thoughts, I covered Poppy's cage once again, understanding why the bird was refusing to even look at me, and slipped out of the loft, locking it securely behind me. I removed the key from my keyring, and posted it through the letterbox, determined never to go back again. And from there, I braced myself for the third task I had set upon reading that invitation that morning.

Maple Grove was warm and inviting, even on the worst day you could imagine, and now that Jon and Vicki were living there with the Old Man, it didn't feel even half as empty as it had done before. But it wasn't Jon or Vicki I had gone to see, and secretly, I hoped they wouldn't know I had been there until I was gone. I didn't think I would be able to bear seeing them so happy. Not today.

Humphrey was in a thankfully good mood when I entered, and though he wasn't really my grandfather, he greeted me like one of his grandchildren, complaining that I hadn't brought Lyneth with me and making me promise to keep my promise to her to come to the Christmas 'do. He held me in idle chatter over tea for a pleasant while, until suddenly the question I had been half-dreading came at me out of nowhere.

"So, Piper, where is young Oliver these days?"

I know I froze. I know I stayed frozen far longer than I should have done, if the alarmed expression on the old man's face was anything to go by. But I did manage to calm myself down. This was, after all, why I had visited in the first place. The Old Man needed to know what had happened, and I was determined to give him the facts as I knew them, without adding my own emotional coloration to the sad tale.

I began at the beginning, at the weeks after the wedding which had been so happy, moving through Christmas, and into the winter that had dragged Ollie down into the depths of some darkness where I couldn't follow. I was careful only to describe how he had been, not how I had felt. It was not my intention to set Humphrey against his nephew; when Ollie returned, his family would need to gather around him. He would need them, especially since Laura was still missing. Humphrey listened with his brown eyes keen, letting me walk him through the night that thing with Ollie's face had come to the loft and stayed; through Jon's suspicions at the time - which I think didn't come as much of a shock -; through the summer I had spent playing the good wife, doing everything that unknown thing had asked of me and still being edged out of my daughter's life; into the beginning of autumn, and the darkness that had taken the intruder in our lives until he abruptly left us on our own; and finally through the annulment, and my decision to move myself and Lyneth out of Ollie's reach.

The Old Man was quiet for a long time after I had finished, gently patting my hand as he mulled over all I had said. "Well, Piper love," he said eventually, "I won't say I approve of your decision, because I don't. Oliver's taken a wealth of hard knocks over his life, like so many of my brood, and this will hurt him badly, if he ever comes home. But you have to do what you feel is necessary, to protect your child and yourself, and I won't argue with that. Just don't put yourself out of everyone's reach. We miss having you and the little one around, being able to see for ourselves that you're both well. You are always welcome at the Grove, Piper. Don't forget it."

I don't think I knew what to say. He didn't approve of what I had done, but he wasn't blaming me. He wasn't holding my decision against me, and better yet, Lyneth and I were still welcome at the big old house. Old Man Granger still thought of us as family, despite our long absence. I think I cried on him, to tell the truth, I was so relieved not to be blamed entirely for Ollie's disappearance and our own deliberate slip through the cracks.

If it hadn't been for the need to pick Lyneth up from nursery, I would have stayed far longer, I'm sure. In the right mood, Humphrey Granger can wrap a person up in a sense of utter security, making you believe you were completely safe so long as you stayed in his company. I was reluctant to leave, but I had responsibilities of my own. But at least I knew now that I wasn't as alone as I had thought I was. I might not be a Granger by marriage any longer, but it didn't seem to matter. We were still family.