She paused – it was difficult thinking about them all – the people she loved most in the world, the people who would represent her greatest loss if she couldn’t find her way back. “Jamie is my boyfriend – I love him.”
It wasn’t clear in her mind exactly why she was telling Alex this particular piece of information, it certainly wasn’t relevant to her story, but somehow it felt essential that Alex understood. His face was unreadable as he nodded for her to continue.
“So Rob was with my dad on this camping trip and there was a car accident. My father was driving and he flipped the car. Rob was thrown free, he suffered some cuts and bruises and a fairly serious knock to the head. By the time he came to, the car was on fire and my father was dead.”
Her voice was raw, it had been five years but the wound would never fully heal. The shock and pain and grief never faded, she just got better at not thinking about it. Time had passed, but nothing would ever truly cover up the person shaped hole her father’s death had left in her.
Alex reached out and touched two fingers gently on her elbow. It was small and brief, but it lent her enough strength to continue.
Allyra forced herself to continue. “When they first told me, I was so overwhelmed by grief that I saw nothing but darkness. I couldn’t believe that he was just gone. Gone without cause or reason. I couldn’t accept that it was just some twist of fate that stole away the most important person in my life. I became a shell that breathed and ate and drank only because I was told to – because my mind couldn’t even conceive of an alternative. I didn’t see the body, they wouldn’t let me, it was burnt beyond recognition. I don’t really remember the first few weeks after his death, but during that time he was buried and I became a ward of Juliette Thiessen.
It was the defining event of my life and it felt as if my sorrow was large enough to consume the world. But that’s obviously not the case. The world continued turning and eventually my mind cleared and I rejoined the world. My father’s estate had been settled while I was mired in my own grief. When I finally read through his will, I started to realize that I hadn’t really known him at all.
We weren’t poor, but we certainly weren’t rich either. My father was a great vet, but a poor businessman. He could never bear to see an animal suffering so he would treat them even when their owners couldn’t pay, this meant that some months we had to scrape by – but it was enough. I never once felt like I needed more. I didn’t ever have any illusions regarding the state of our finances. I believed that with my father gone I would be totally dependent on the Thiessens. But that wasn’t the case – according to his will my father was actually a rich man. He owned massive tracts of land and money handed down over generations. For whatever reason, he never touched the money, but he invested it shrewdly and left me a very wealthy woman.
I was utterly confused – I couldn’t wrap my mind around why he’d kept all these secrets from me. I wanted answers and as I dug through his will, I realized he’d left me everything except a small piece of land that he left to Jamie. This piece of land was completely surrounded by land my father left to me and I couldn’t understand it. Was it some kind of ransom strip to keep me from selling the land? Was there something special there? I wanted answers. I wanted to see it for myself. The Thiessens all tried to stop me, they wanted me to let it go and get on with my life and because they were so kind, and I knew they just wanted the best for me – I tried, I really tried to put it all out of my mind and let it fade into the past. But the questions plagued me, it was like a mosquito whining in my head – completely impossible to ignore. Absurdly I felt like I no longer knew myself because it turned out I never knew the man that raised me.
So exactly a year after my father’s death, I found my way to Jamie’s piece of land. And at first I couldn’t understand it – it was just on this massive, empty game farm. There was nothing there. The only feature of any interest was the rocky outcrop with the Baobab tree, so as a last ditch effort; I went there and started climbing. As soon as I set foot on that rock, I knew. I knew that this was where my father died. Not in some fiery car accident, but right there on that rock. I could feel the echoes resonating off this place – shouting, screaming the truth at me.”
“Echoes?” Alex asked softly.
Allyra flinched. She’d almost forgotten he was there. She was getting lost in her own painful memories.
How much to tell him about her ability to feel memories or the past?
Even those closest to her, even Jamie, had never truly believed her. But if there was ever going to be a person who might actually believe her, it was probably Alex. He’d watched her emerge from a tree, had fought Revenants and had danced through moving, lethal trees – all without batting so much as an eyelid. A person that claimed to see the past probably wouldn’t even register on his strangeness meter.
“I always thought I could feel or hear echoes of memories. Not just a person’s memories, but also
