By the time it got dark, Cassie had left Ronnie far behind. All thoughts of their beginning relationship had disappeared after she had said goodbye to Jake, possibly forever. As she watched him leave, she had realized that whatever she had felt for Ronnie was nothing like the way she had loved Jake. She had thought that she had gotten over him, but that had just been a delusion of herself.
When she returned to their home, he was already asleep and Cassie thought it was better this way. Silently she walked into the bedroom, trying not to wake him, but he heard her anyway. She just said: "I am tired. We will talk tomorrow." Then she ignored his confused questions, rolled to the side and fell asleep.
When she woke up next morning, Ronnie was already awake, sitting at the table in the kitchen, waiting for her. He had prepared her favourite breakfast as though he believed he had done something wrong. Cassie did not want to disappoint him, so she ate automatically, even though it tasted like ashes. After she had finished and put the plates in the dishwasher, she looked at him, took a deep breath and said: "Ronnie, I am sorry, I really am, but I can not do this any longer, it is not fair to you. I have realized now that I only used you to fill the gap that Jake has left.
You deserve someone that loves you the way you love me. It is better for both of us if we break it up now, before we do something we might regret later on."
Ronnie just stared at her. After a while he left the kitchen angrily. Cassie heard him open the wardrobe upstairs and buried her head in her hands. She only looked up again after she heard the door slam and Ronnie“s car pull away. She kept herself busy until it was time to go to work. The Hork-Bajir population had grown so fast that they would probably have to get relocated soon and she needed to talk to Toby about the best place where they could live and if it was better to let them all move together or split them up and let one half stay in Yellowstone and move the other half somewhere else, maybe to Yosemite or the Olympic National Park.
But that was not the only one of Cassie“s problems at the moment. Last month there had been a riot at the space port in New York, as a group of heavily armed men tried to attack Andalite tourists halfway into the arrival area. They had given up quickly after some of them had tails from nearby guards to their throats, but Cassie feared it might be only the beginning of spreading hate against their allies.
