Chapter 3

Myka pulls her jacket closely around her as she makes her way back to the B&B. The air suddenly feels colder, the night seems a little bit darker than she remembered. Everything is still, quiet. Everything except her own tumultuous thoughts.

She shrieks in surprise as she feels the hand on her shoulder.

"Sorry!" Pete tells her. "Did I scare you?"

Despite only moments ago feeling so alone, she resents instantly Pete's intrusion into her space.

"Of course not." She answers, pulling herself together. Followed by "Don't sneak up on people like that!"

"Sneak up? I didn't sneak up on you. I called your name three times. You were lost in a world of your own."

"Was not." She protests.

"Everything ok?" He asks as they walk side by side. He is sweet to her. She sees the concern in his eyes, as always. But she finds herself annoyed. She resents it. Resents him. Subconsciously she has picked up her pace, anxious to be alone with her thoughts once again.

"Fine." She answers, in a tone that tells him to back the hell off and leave her alone.

She walks ahead of him, listening to his hesitant footsteps trailing behind her. She tells herself she ought to feel bad for wounding his feelings. But there is no room for that, for him, in her thoughts tonight.

She feels a distant terror taking hold of her as she makes her way silently to her room, shutting the door without a second glance to see if Pete is still behind her. It's a different terror to anything she has encountered in her life, in her work. It's not a fear for her own life, or for the people around her. It's not even fear for HG Wells.

It's a deep fear that the essence of who she is is slipping from her grasp. It's a deep sense of loneliness and isolation, which is ridiculous. Because she is surrounded, for the first time in her life, by people who consider her family. People she knows would lay down their very lives for her. And yet she has never, before this night, felt more alone. Entirely and utterly abandoned. Helpless.

Myka feels haunted, by the look in HG Wells eyes. Something she can't quite put her finger on, there are no words to articulate. But when she closes her eyes, always the other woman is before her.

She finds herself wishing somehow to turn back the clock, before she met HG Wells. Before all of this confusion and terror and longing. Before she had forged this unlikely connection with the other woman. She longs for the days she had been able to simply reach over and switch out the light, and fall asleep.

But on a deeper level, she doesn't wish to turn back the clock at all. She can't quite bring herself to wish the other woman out of her life. HG was here, a part of her, unmistakably. As if there had never been a time without her present. HG has a hold over her. It changes everything. Absolutely everything. But she can't bring herself to wish away the one person she ever felt truly connected to.

Staring out the window in the restless hours of the early morning, she sees it. She knows she sees it. HG Wells. Standing there, shrouded in darkness. Looking up at her, right at her, right through her, with that same haunted expression.

Myka blinks at the sight. And just as suddenly as she had appeared, HG is gone.