Well, here's the epilogue to my version of events! Huge thanks to bonboni for reviewing every chapter of this, as well as everything else I've written. It means so much to me, thank you!
Epilogue
In the fresh light of dawn, Alex was walking towards her home. After leaving her mother behind it hadn't taken her long to figure out which way home was. She'd spent most of her life tracking this area, and knew it like the back of her hand. This was just as well, as she wasn't concentrating on the invisible path in front of her. She couldn't, not after everything that had just happened.
She'd just met her mother. Even though Alex had said she didn't believe her, she did. She'd never experienced this before, blindly believing in something that had no rhyme or reason. In some strange way, it was the very fact that she couldn't explain why she believed it that made her know that the strange woman she'd just met had been telling the truth. Instinct, she guessed.
Maybe it was more than that. She'd never been happy where she'd been raised. She didn't belong there, she didn't think like the people she knew as her family. She'd always felt like she was someone else entirely. Juliet occasionally expressed the opinion that this was typical teenage angst, that everyone felt like that at that age, and so no one should think anything of it. Alex always thought she was hiding something when she said this. Maybe it was this feeling of alienation that made her so ready to believe what that woman – her mother- had said.
Even as she was slowly trudging back to those people, she knew she didn't belong with them. But she didn't belong with her mother, either. She was stuck, unwilling to move one way, unable to move the other, knowing she couldn't stay where she was. She couldn't make it on her own.
She couldn't stop thinking about everything she'd just found out. Her name had a history. She'd always wondered. Names intrigued her, they gave people identities, personalities, many people could say who they'd been named after, or why their parents had chosen their name. Those people had a story to tell from the moment they were born. She never had. In one sentence, one moment, she'd been given a history, a link to other people, proof that she was a part of something.
Then there was the music box. More than anything else she'd just seen or heard, that was the thing that had surprised her the most. She had one just like it. It was one of her most prized possessions. The people who'd raised her had given her a music box identical to the one her father had given her mother. Why? And why had they kept her name? She began to wonder exactly what purpose she was fulfilling by being with them; why they'd taken her. Although she knew the sort of things they did, the thought that she might have a different role than she'd always assumed had never crossed her mind before.
One thing was becoming clear. She was going to see her mother again. She didn't know when, but after that one meeting she realised she'd been missing something her whole life, something she hadn't even noticed was gone until it had been given back to her for a brief time. Now she didn't think she could live without it. She wanted to find out more about herself, about her mother and her father. Everyone she should have had a connection to growing up.
She couldn't leave her family, but she couldn't abandon her mother again either. Somehow, she had to have both. She didn't know how she'd manage it, or even if either party would let her have it, but she was going to try, to whatever end. With that thought now at the forefront of her mind, Alex walked.
The end.