When she awoke, gauzy and warm, she tried not to disengage from her dreams.
It would hurt to leave behind the place she had been. The people there had once meant so much to her. She may even have been in love with one of them.
So Sarah rolled over, hoping to glide back into her dream at the exact moment it had lifted. Improbably, she managed to find it again, the dream where a softspoken man took her by the hand into a dense grove of eucalyptus trees.
Then he was gone and so was she, catapulted off into another scene of the dream, a different backdrop with different people. When she awoke again, still gauzy and warm, she was content to leave the dream behind because the day ahead would be better than any dream.
This was her last day in the little house off Kanan Dume Road. She would go to the bank in Burbank and discover whatever it was her father had left in the safe deposit box.
Everything felt good other than leaving her fellow fugitives. Their time had come to scatter for a month and then regroup.
The prospects of a month alone were unsettling. And it was difficult for Sarah to temper her anticipation, not to expect too much from whatever might be in the safe deposit box.
At least it wouldn’t be a dream. There would be something of her father’s to pull them back together. It might even help put more distance between herself and her family.
This possibility cheered her up. No empty hope, she was already making great strides, no longer bound to a sneering sister and a dismissive mother.
Whatever her father left in that safe deposit box would be enchanting, an amulet that could never be explained, only understood. Even if it wasn’t epic, it was from him to her, which meant more than anything else.
When she awoke, she went into the kitchen and started the coffee. Soon they would all be gone.
