Hmm. I like how this chapter wrote up. It's another example of where the story hijacks where I plan it will go, and takes its own path for a bit.

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It was arranged that Anne would stay there that night, and the rest of the night passed, if not in peaceful slumber, then at least with the pretense that such was possible. Anne arose after only a few hours of sleep in order to be dressed and showered before the girls woke up. She just didn't have the energy to handle any more explanations at the moment. Let Mark and Kathryn have a chance to set the record straight. It didn't always have to be her fixing the messes that life created.

She yawned hugely as she closed the front door behind her and stepped off the front porch. Dawn was still only a faint lightening of the sky, a hint that the night would end, and the streets were silent as she walked to work. She fingered the computer cube in her pocket and tried very hard to think only of work. And mostly failed. The question that haunted her, that mocked her, would not let her mind rest on mundane matters. It rose again and again, no mater how hard she tried to push it away.

Why would Ace do that? Why would Ace do that, to her? To her, of all people? It continued to torment her, taking up all the space in her waking thoughts, stealing in around the edges of whatever barrier she tried to erect between her problems and the rest of her life.

She had never meant to hurt her, never tried to harm her in any way. Surely her absence didn't, couldn't have hurt her that much.

Didn't she see that she couldn't have stayed? There was just too much, it was all too much for her to handle. To have gone from a place that was pain and misery, pain and more pain, never with an end in sight, to have gone from there to somewhere that she could have had a family, where people wanted her around, where they seemed to care for her at all, couldn't she see that it was overwhelming her?

She kicked at a rock on the sidewalk, moving it up her path so she could kick it again and again as she walked. This place, any place, it had stopped feeling real to her. She had stopped feeling real to herself, caught up as she was in the lives of others. She needed to get herself back before she lost that one last final bit, lost it forever and disappeared. Something in her would have died if she had stayed. She knew that, knew it would happen with the finality of fate. It always happened to her. Some god she had offended in her youth had surely cursed her.

Anne thought she knew what it was that had troubled her so. After all the years of hopelessness, after all the time where the only person she could count on to never fail her was herself, finding that there were people out there who truly wouldn't let her down was too much for her. It was almost as if she could hope again.

Her hope had died, some time before she ever came here. She had dreamed of a place where she could be accepted for what she was, but had stopped believing that she could find a place like that in her own world. She still dreamed, but had lost the hope that her dreams would ever come true.

And then they had. Amazingly, impossibly, they had. Admitting that, she had to believe, and in believing she had to have hope.

But hope was too much for her. It's far easier to take each day, knowing that what will come is a mixture of bland and bad, with a scant bit of good fortune tossed in for fair measure and to keep one guessing. Never hope that today a dream might come true, never hope that today might be a day different from all the rest because it was better, because it never ever was. Never better. Sometimes decent, oftentimes bland, occasionally very bad, but better always implied that the direction of things might change, that the bland days might move more towards decent, and maybe even eventually throwing in a few good days for spice.

Her mouth twisted, lips pursed as if she had tasted something sour as she remembered one of her homilies. Hope is only a demon, last of them all, tormenting only the weak.

In the story of Pandora's box, when curiosity overcomes caution with ill results, demons of misery spread to cover the land, and the last thing to emerge from the box, well after the evils had fled, was hope. Hope, which was supposed to be the remedy, the apology offered by the gods after ill escaped, was always to her just the last of the evils. Far better to just take what you saw, cope with what was there then lie to yourself and find ways to make circumstances better in any way. Hopes dashed were more painful than any ill, disease, or famine that ever preceded the last demon from the box.

She had run when she first felt hope stir within her. Hope that these days might last, that she might live to see days where she wasn't always afraid that people were going to hurt her. Where instead they would love her. It was too painful, too new a feeling for her to handle. Much better to run, to stop and see if she could handle having hopes at all before something inevitably happened to dash them.

Something like what Ace had done. She kicked the rock so hard then that it spun off somewhere in the distance ahead and she lost it. She was right to not hope. Right to believe that there would never be a place for her where people accepted her. Never. Ever.

She bit back tears again, hating the weakness. Dashed hopes, that's all it was. Nothing that she couldn't deal with, couldn't handle. She knew how to not hope, how to keep herself from being so close to others that hope ever came into question. Trust? Fools trusted.

And she had been a mighty fool.