Alison is a cool spring day.
Whispers of snow on the eyelids.
She’s a palace of ice. An igloo in a forest.
She’s the hot fire warming ice cold hands.
Alison is an orphan. Some of her clearest days are of black dresses and caskets lowering into the ground.
Alison is a Goddaughter. Her wonderful wonderful Godfather and his beautiful wife. Days filled with laughter and sunshine and joy . . .
Alison is a heart-sister. Her glorious ray of a brother. Ginger hair and tentative smiles worth far more than all the rubies in the world.
‘Once upon a time there was a young girl with mousy hair and witchy eyes’ pouts and glares and ‘Earl! Chad is picking on me again!’
‘Chad don’t tease your sister.’
‘But she makes it so easy.’ smirks and hugs and Millie Renee’s cookies.
She missed her parents. But she was ever enveloped in warmth and laughter and family.
When Renee dies it feels as though the scabs in her heart are torn open and trampled upon.
When Chad leaves for college with tight lips and a frozen heart, Alison feels those freshly wrought wounds run through a grinder.
Then Marcus with his boyish smile and blue-blue eyes that gleam with untold secrets and the baby that wasn’t to be.
Alison’s battered heart is taped together by the warmth of her friends and yet she doesn’t dare tell them that.
Alison is sunlight through a foggy window.
A feather pillow under a soft blanket.
She is beauty and she is grace.
Yet she feels like she’s fallen flat on her face.
Alison is just getting used to smiling and feeling and hiding secrets again when a cane collides with her future.
An Irish tongue and scars on his face and Alison’s duct-taped heart starts beating again.
Feelings pop in and she can’t help but fall into them.
And neither can he.
He teaches her how to live again and when tears run down her cheeks while her sides hurt from laughter she realizes that she hadn’t lived for a good long while.
She falls a bit more for him in that moment.
Alison adopted Rufus off the side of the road. On the way home from the clinic she sees a tiny malnourished puppy sitting inside a cardboard box.
She reacts without thinking.
Was it guilt or sympathy, she never can tell.
But her tears soak his fur and she whispers all her secrets to his tiny ears.
Because she never wanted to get rid of her baby. But she didn’t want to lose Marcus more.
Yet she loses both of them and she is left alone with puppy dog kisses on her cheeks.
When she tells William about her secret she expects him to scream or yell or to leave her.
But he doesn’t.
He stays. He holds her tight and hope ignites down deep in her soul.
A hope secured when she wakes to find him at her side.
William would never leave.
And her duct-taped heart starts to heal.
