She was not quite sure about the way their friendship had begun. All she recollected was that one week after mediocre basketball player AJ had pushed her non-bouncing head into the basket dubbed 'junk people', she had dared go out of her house – which was not her home – but only when the sun had gone down, as though seeing the light would have burned her pale tortured skin which had been insensitively touched too often, and blinded her pale tortured eyes, which had been pierced over and over again because they had witnessed the two-facedness thriving outside the locked door of her soul.
She had ended up on the pier, coming from nowhere, watching the horizon leading to nowhere, thoughts filling her mind which was reflecting that nowhere and everywhere might be the two faces of the same coin… somewhere. She had walked in slow motion, thinking of her deceased parents, Thomas and Cathy. She had left England as an orphan, and like an orphan she had wanted to create a radiant life for herself, so that her parents would be proud of their only daughter, wherever God had taken them to. Sunset Beach looked like the surrogate mother who could bring her warmth and sympathy. Sunset Beach had assumed this responsibility for a while. Although Olivia had been poor when she had set foot on the Californian ground, she had quickly raised to prosperity, both on the personal and the monetary level. But the top of the ladder had not been secure enough and she had fallen deeper and deeper, year in year out, into some bottomless abyss. Now she was feeling poor again, or even worse: she was a bereaved orphan for the second time, with no ties to keep her wonky pieces together.
Of course, she had her two children to remind her of her worthiness and devotion. They had reacted serenely to the news of her split with AJ-the-split-personality. How could this have been different, with Bette being Sean's future mother-in-law and AJ being Caitlin's actual father-in-law? She had been grateful for their not having explicitly expressed their astonishment; her own bewilderment was already hard enough to bear. The look in their eyes had sufficed to make her realise they were on her side.
This implicit response had proved to be in total contrast with the I-am-jumping-for-joy reaction coming from Bette's niece, Annie. Annie seemed to have become the happiest person waddling along in the streets of Sunset Beach. She had always detested Olivia for several reasons which could reverberate as follows: Olivia was classy, Olivia had made her father Del crazy, and Olivia had Gregory. With AJ settled down with her lovely aunt Bette, Annie was savouring her revenge. To Annie, Olivia looked as though she had lost all her appeal, all the more since Annie was now the woman married to Gregory.
Those were Olivia's thoughts on the lonely pier of her lonely life, tears filling her eyes because she who had had it all was now facing a wall to recall. What she had done to deserve all this was beyond her grasp. She saw the water of the ocean, blue during the day, black at night. "I used to be like a blue sea day and night," she told herself. "Now, I'm a persistent black sea." Irony was getting hold of her all over again when she remembered that AJ was the one who prevented her from drowning herself while she was on her desperate cruise. He had thwarted her desire to be reunited with and merge into her mirror image, the dark sea. "Now he does not care, now no man cares. He saved me in order to slay me the way [be]he[/be] wanted to, not the way [be]I[/be] had chosen for myself," she said audibly.
"Olivia?," a voice whispered. She thought the voice was a dream coming right from the devil, or the deep dark sea; she could not decide. The voice resumed its concern: "Is that you? What are you talking about? What are you doing here? It's two o'clock in the morning, you're freezing."
And there he was, in flesh and blood, entering her mind with questions she had no answer to. "He should not be here," she thought. "He should be in bed with his shrew of a wife, not in the casket of his wreck of an ex-wife"…