Page 94 of Her Highland Prophecy
She ran a hand down her face, deciding that it was pointless to try and go back to sleep. The sky outside her windows was already starting to rise in the distance.
She scrubbed her face again, remnants of the dream she had had before waking fluttering back to her.
It had been Diana and an unknown man on the grass near a lake. She didn’t remember much of it, besides their mother’s necklace in her sister’s hands and the feeling of utter joy the whole dream emanated, the love between Diana and the large man almost palpable in the dream.
It had not been the first time she had dreamed of her sister with that man since the day that she disappeared. At first, the dreams had given her hope, and she had given his description to the police hoping to locate them, only to be laughed at when she explained that she had seen him in a dream.
Grace shook her head. She was not a silly child anymore to confuse dreams and reality. Her life had given her a heady dose of reality in the last few weeks and she was not so innocent as she might have once been.
She had agreed to meet with Louisa for tea at the little French café that had just opened in London, so she grabbed an umbrella and indicated the address to her driver. It was a short ride, and soon she was walking into the café to find that Louisa was already there waiting for her.
“Grace!” her friend waved her over. Grace walked to the table where Louisa was sitting and ordered a coffee along with a scone.
“What did you want to talk about?” Louisa asked once they had been served.
Grace breathed in the smell of the dark beverage she had come to depend on over the last few months. The taste somehow never lived up to the smell, but it had gotten her through many sleepless nights, when the urge to look for one more clue, read the police report one more time became too much.
“They are giving up on the investigation,” she said, and watched as Louisa’s face fell. “The detective said that it had been too long and that with so little evidence, they had very little hope of ever finding her.”
Louisa looked at her with sympathy.
“That’s awful, Grace. We are all still hoping that she will just turn up one day, telling us that she got caught up in some old, dusty library researching something or other.”
Grace chuckled, but her face quickly sobered again.
“She was only ever gone for a couple of days when that happened. It’s been two months, Louisa! I don’t know what happened, but I can’t stop thinking that she would never have given up on finding me if I were the one who was lost.”
The dream she had had that morning popped into her head again, but she pushed it away again.
“What is it?” Louisa asked. “Did you think of something?”
Damn her friend and her perceptiveness. She knew she would never get away with not revealing what she was thinking.
“Nothing really,” Grace said dismissively. “Just these dreams I have been having.”
“Dreams?” Louisa asked. “Like the one with the big red-headed man with your sister?”
Twice damned her friend’s good memory. She nodded.
“I have had a few similar ones,” she admitted.
Louisa scrunched her face in thought.
“Don’t you think that it is important that you keep dreaming about them?”
“Of course I do! But the police won’t take me seriously and refuse to look for him. I tried to hire an investigator but he laughed in my face and told me to ‘come back with my father’. Arsehole.”
Louisa laughed a little but then her face turned serious again.
“What if you aren’t meant to go looking for her? What if this is the universe’s way of showing you that, wherever she is, she is happy.”
“So I’m supposed to just let it go?”
“I miss her,” Grace admitted after a moment, her eyes watering slightly. She missed the easy camaraderie they shared.
“I know you do,” Louisa said, patting her on the back soothingly. “But isn’t it more important that she be happy somewhere?”
Grace thought about what her friend was saying. If these dreams were the universe’s way of telling her that Diana was somewhere safe and loved, then, did she genuinely want to disrupt it?
