Prologue - August 2010
Most of Europe is on vacation now, Carla thought to herself as she broke apart a warm croissant she had just bought from the neighborhood bakery. Beads of perspiration glistened on her forehead as she gingerly placed the first bite of the flaky buttery pastry in her mouth. Where had he taken his family this year?
Oblivious to the already stifling heat of a typical August morning in Houston, she ran the index finger of her left hand around the rim of her plate as she sat slouched over her blue tiled bistro table on her small covered apartment patio. Gazing out across the grassy expanse that separated her apartment from the community pool, her mind traveled 5,000 miles away.
Last year he had taken them to Florence, Italy, where her own roots were; the year before, it was the Grand Canyon. Would they ever get to travel together on vacation? She reminisced about how it all had started 11 years before.
His face first appeared while she was meditating one day at home at her usual time mid-afternoon, just before her kids came home from school. The image was blurry as if she was seeing him through a filter. She was able to tell that his hair was sandy brown, and his eyes a blue that pierced through the veil. The image became more frequent, a little clearer each time, yet other than his penetrating eyes, his facial features were still hazy, as if she wasn’t supposed to see who he was.
Was it a fantasy arising from her unconscious...a means of compensating for her sense of aloneness and feelings of discontent in her life? She had been married for 11 years, but the marriage had faltered. She and her husband had grown apart, living their own lives and sleeping in separate bedrooms. It had become more of a marriage of convenience than anything based on love, as there were no longer any emotional ties between them.
With writing being such a deep passion of hers, she had decided to translate the five months of recurring dreams into a story, a novel. With a plethora of scenes and images bouncing around in her head, she had developed a detailed synopsis and had managed to write the first three chapters before the “busyness” of her life interfered with her creative endeavor and the story was left dormant on her laptop. That is, until almost a decade later when it manifested into reality...
