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Leaning down, Anne tied her shoelaces. She would rather be wearing her rainboots, but she had unwisely left them at Charles and Mary’s house. An umbrella would have to do for the slight trek to her car.
The weather was unseasonably wet, but she was okay with it. For some reason, the sound of the rain hitting her bedroom window was relaxing in ways that only she understood.
“Where are you going?” Walter Elliot asked his middle daughter from the doorway that led into the living room.
It was a constant complaint of his and Elizabeth’s that the beach house did not have an open concept floor plan. How else could he monitor the comings and goings from his own home without a clear line of vision from his favorite chair into the front foyer?
They also complained about not having enough money to make the ‘necessary’ home improvements.
“I’m going to visit a friend,” Anne answered him.
“You’ve been here a little over a week and most of that time was spent on the computer filling out pointless applications.”
“My time spent preparing for my future was not pointless,” Anne countered. “And I have a friend from high school that moved down here with her boyfriend at the time for school. I would have visited her yesterday, except she had a doctor’s appointment.”
“With Will?” Elizabeth asked, popping her head up from the yoga pose she was in the middle of performing.
“I don’t know who her doctor is,” Anne admitted.
“That’s a shame,” Elizabeth sighed, moving back into her pose.
She didn’t bother asking which friend. Elizabeth never really cared about Anne beyond what Anne could do for Elizabeth.
“Who is this friend?” Walter demanded to know.
“Robin Moore Smith,” she answered him. “She was my best friend in school. She spent the night a few times.”
Shrugging a shoulder, he dismissed her. “Just be back in time for Will’s visit,” he instructed her. “Will can do better for you and your future than some Mrs. Smith can do.”
“Robin’s husband was studying to become a doctor.” Looking up from grabbing her umbrella, she added, “And I don’t know when I’ll be back.”
“Oh,” Elizabeth’s head popped up. “A future doctor.”
“Was,” Anne corrected. “He died in a car accident two years ago.”
Waving a hand in dismissal, Elizabeth rolled her eyes and went back to yoga.
“So...” Walter trailed off, his eyes narrowed. “You would rather spend time with an unknown widow that can do nothing to help elevate your social or financial standing?”
“Father,” Anne tried to warn him before he said anything else.
“Tell me,” he demanded, “what can this widow provide you that Will can’t? Widows only want one thing and that is to find a way into my pockets.”
Standing up from where she was practicing her own yoga poses next to Elizabeth, Penelope left the room, barely brushing away the tears that threatened to fall from her eyes.
“Father,” Anne hissed. “Not every single widow has an ulterior motive. Sometimes they are just friends, much like Penelope is to Elizabeth.”
Waving a hand in dismissal, Walter ignored the underlying message beneath Anne’s comment. “Widows are widows are widows. If it looks like a gold digger, it is a gold digger.”
Elizabeth stood up, glared at Anne instead of the person making comments, and stormed out of the room, leaving the yoga mats in the middle of the floor.
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Checking the address on her phone, Anne knocked on the, thankfully, first-floor apartment door. She had no idea what to expect. She hadn’t seen Robin ever since high school and they went off in their own directions.
Social media didn’t count, even if they talked more than Anne did with the people on her Facebook Friends List that were attending the same college as she had been. She could count on her hands, and feet, how many times she had seen a former high school classmate in public that pretended that he or she didn’t recognize Anne.
Granted, there were a few people that Anne did the same with and was more than careful avoid them.
“Coming!” sounded from the other side of the door. “I’ll be there in a moment, Anne!”
Anne had no idea what she was about to see. Robin was careful to keep pictures of herself off of social media. At least, she kept pictures of more than just her headshot off of all of her social media accounts.
But Anne recalled that Robin had been in a car accident that had killed Nathan, even if she wasn’t aware of the details. Nobody except Robin, Nathan, and whoever hit them was aware of the details. Mrs. Moore certainly never talked about what had happened to her daughter.
Anne wasn’t even certain if Robin’s parents ever talked to Robin anymore, let alone come to visit her.
Suddenly the door opened, even if Robin wasn’t visible. “Come on in,” she said, her voice muffled from behind the door. “I don’t want you to be shocked when you finally see me, but...”
“Robin,” Anne interrupted, taking the door from Robin’s hand. “I already know you were in a car accident.”
Pulling the door away and shutting it, revealed her friend in a wheelchair. “I was lucky to get a first-floor apartment. Apparently, the elevator keeps breaking down in this building because everybody keeps overloading the circuits or some technical excuse the landlords give in order to keep people from complaining too much.”
Anne quickly cut off her friend’s rambling by dropping her purse on the floor and leaning down to give Robin a tight hug. “I’ve missed you so much,” she whispered into the other girl’s hair. “I have so much to tell you.”
Feeling arms wrapping around her as well, “You have no idea how much I missed you as well. I think I would have gone crazy without your messages.”
Pulling away, Anne took a moment to look around the room. Robin recognized this from years ago. She expected that Anne would start to examine her space around her after they had gotten the surprisingly not awkward first meeting out of the way.
Surrounding every space that Robin could reach was fashion designs and torn out pages from magazines.
“Oh my goodness,” Anne breathed, turning around the room. “I knew you should have gone to fashion school instead of becoming a nurse.”
“Oh, but I did discover some valuable contacts while in nursing school. One of my friends, Meredith Rook, comes over and helps me with some of the things that I can’t do. She also sticks around and gives me a fair amount of the local gossip.”
“I would love to meet your Nurse Rook. She sounds as if she could be a huge help for me. I’d love to know how my family is viewed in this place.”
“Are you certain you want to know?”
“Do you know?”
“Of course, I know!” Robin exclaimed. “Go sit down and we’ll have a lovely chat.”
“Who are you and what have you done with my Robin?”
“We all grew up,” Robin demurely answered her. “I spend a lot of time reading lately.”
“You can always leave your apartment.”
“Honestly, the first time I attempted to leave I had a panic attack. Meredith had to calm me down and bring me back into my apartment.”
“What happened?”
Robin pointed towards the scar that dissected her left cheek, “A shard of glass from the window made a deeper cut than anybody realized.”
“That’s not what I meant and you know it.”
“A kid saw me and started to point. That kid’s older brother started to laugh. Their mother stared at me in horror as she hurried her rude boys away. Then suddenly I could see it happening over and over again. I had flashes of that scene in The Princess Bride when Westley taunts Prince Humperdinck about scarring him to the point of children screaming in fear and asking what that ‘thing’ was.”
“Oh, Robin,” Anne whispered, a tear falling down her face. “That’s simply horrible.”
“I know.”
“But you can’t let three rude people dictate what you do with your life,” Anne stated.
“I feel as if I have heard something along those lines before.”
“You probably told me that.”
“I probably did.” Tilting her head, Robin eyed Anne carefully. “You look different.”
“My hair is still in its ponytail.”
“But, if your newsfeed is any indication, it hasn’t always been.”
“No, it hasn’t,” Anne replied, looking down.
“Can you tell me what happened?”
“How long do you have?”
Spreading her arms wide, Robin joked, “All the time in the world.”
For the next two hours, Anne told Robin everything that had happened over the last year.
