Charlotte groaned as the alarm burst through her mind’s eye, drawing her firmly into the unwelcome present. Her husband Dan reached over to switch it off, dropped a kiss onto her nose and leapt out of the bed into the shower. As she nestled under the quilt once more, Charlotte wished she knew how Dan could be so raring to go in the morning. Then again, he doesn’t suffer from nightmares, she thought.
Finally
lifting herself off the mattress, Charlotte pulled her blonde ringlets out of
her eyes and peered into the mirror. What a sight, she murmured to
herself. I barely slept at all, and when I finally enjoy a peaceful sleep, it’s
time to get up.
Dan
padded back into the bedroom, rubbing his hair dry and eyeing his wife with
concern.
“Nightmares
again?” he asked, his kind eyes full of sympathy.
“Yes,”
Charlotte assented sheepishly, not wanting to worry him. She pushed away the images flashing before
her eyes – the gated room, the wooden floor, the mysterious figure looming over
her….
“Well,
maybe you should sleep in this morning,” Dan suggested. “I can’t,” said Charlotte, pulling on her running clothes. “There’s a staff meeting this afternoon and I need to do some reading before then, so I can report my progress to Professor Latimer.”
Dan
wrapped his arms around her, forcing her to stop tying her shoelace.
“You
work too hard, you know you do. This is
meant to be a sabbatical, why are you going into work? I thought we might see more of each other
whilst you wrote this book, but that’s not how it’s working out, is it?”
Charlotte
instantly felt guilty, but she was prepared to stand her ground. This book was important to her. “You know what this book means to me,” she
said, heading for the door. “You know
what Anne means to me.”
“It’s
not worth the nightmares though is it?”
Dan shouted as she went downstairs and out the door.
