Page 2 of Ruled By Fate

“I know why you’re asking,” she interrupted, “and I’m fine, really. Now I promise I’ll check in when I get to Virginia, but this line is full of static, and I’m going through a tunnel—”

“Wait, I thought you were—”

She hung up quickly, biting at her lower lip.

That could have been handled better.

She slipped her phone into her pocket and continued down the trail.

A few minutes later, she cleared the last of the trees and pulled in a deep breath, letting the mist from the churning water whisper gently across her face. The sunlight bounced off the water and dazzled her eyes for a moment before she quietly spoke. “Hi, Mom.”

She never felt close to her mother at the cemetery. But here in the woods, in her favorite childhood spot, the place they were headed when she died, Brie felt her presence.

She settled cross-legged on a smooth, flat stone overlooking the falls and gazed over the tranquil scene. Splashes of water chimed sweetly below her. Time ceased to matter, as though the world stopped at the entrance of the forest, like all the problems that plagued her on the other side had simply melted away. As she watched, a silver fox loped out of the underbrush and cocked its head, studying her. Brie was taken aback — the creature had one green eye and one blue. She stared, astonished, unable to believe it would venture so close. Just as she was about to move, it winked.

“Did you just wink at me?” she asked incredulously. “Can foxes wink?”

Sherry is never going to believe this.

The fox almost seemed to smirk before skittering away into the trees.

“Did you see that, Mom?” she whispered, waiting a moment for an answer she knew would never come. She shook her head as though to dispel the curious incident, deliberately not thinking about how many similar and strange things had happened to her in these woods.

“Sherry can’t wait for me to get to Virginia,” she continued softly. “She’s all excited about some guy she met named Mike. And she swears I’ll love my new place. She went on and on about ‘cottage vibes.’ You know me. As long as there’s a bed and a coffee maker, I’m fine.”

She went silent, watching the play of water over the rocks and checking the treeline for overly friendly woodland creatures before continuing. “I don’t know how Dad will deal with both of us gone. I’ll try to come home as often as possible to take care of him, but you know how busy the first year of this job is supposed to be.”

She reached for the chain that had been placed around her neck on that terrible day. There hadn’t been a single moment that she’d taken it off. Not ever.

“I miss you, Mom. All the time.”

She brought the pendant to her lips and kissed it gently before tucking it back under her shirt. It wasn’t until she’d risen to leave that she turned around with a passing thought.

“Mom, since you’re up in heaven, do me a favor, would you? If you ever see that ‘guardian angel’ guy again? Cameron? Punch him in the face.”

With a last look at the lovely waterfall splashing into the pool below, she inhaled a deep breath of warm, fragrant air and started to run home.

She didn’t see the palm-sized golden glimmer, near-indistinguishable from the sunlight, tuck itself away behind the trunk of a pine as she ran off.

She never saw it. It made sure of that.

? ? ?

It was another half hour before Brie arrived at her apartment, red-cheeked and gasping for breath. She hung her keys on the hook by the door and made straight for the refrigerator to down a protein-laced tropical fruit amalgamation Sherry once told her was indispensable for her electrolytes. She generally made it a practice to do as Sherry commanded, assured that her best friend’s penchant for storing vast amounts of pseudo-useful information would see her through.

She wandered into the living room, making a mental note of what had yet to be packed. There wasn’t much. Although she’d been there a year and a half, she’d never fully moved into the place. Aside from a series of sun-bleached photographs, a rapidly decaying Ficus tree constituted one of her only attempts to nest. She stroked one of the lank, yellow leaves before fetching a glass of water. The little tree shuddered pitifully as she poured it in.

“There you go, little one,” she whispered encouragingly. “You’ve got this.” She’d read online that houseplants lived longer if you talked to them. After a moment of indecision, she poured in the rest of her fruit smoothie as well.

Couldn’t hurt.

She checked her phone — two voice messages. She put it on speaker.

The first was from Sherry.

“Darling! You need to get here already. You know what happens when you’re not around to rein in my genius designs. Sidenote: Is there any such thing as too pink? I’m looking at an ottoman that would, in the wrong hands, be frankly shocking.”

Brie grinned, rolled her eyes, and started putting the few personal items that decorated her living room into a cardboard box. Sherry was in the middle of another interior design project, and Brie knew her opinion wasn’t required. Her best friend was merely looking for an excuse to go full-magenta on some poor, unsuspecting home decor as she deconstructed, then reconstructed her apartment into something resembling an eccentric Vogue Home Edition centerfold.

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