Sacred Prayer | Taylor Swift

four

"February 2011, All Too Well lyrics, 1st Draft

There we are again when you blew the candle out took this blazing love steered it right into the ground running scared I was there"

"Be good for Tita okay?" Stella hummed sweetly as she securely buckled Alana into her stroller. (Be good for your aunt)

The little brunette only nodded in agreement before casting a hopeful glance back at her aunt "Go to park?"

"We will for a little bit, yeah" Stephanie confirmed, laying out the plan to take Alana to the park for an hour, and if Stella was still tied up at the store then she would take her home and start bathing the little girl and getting her ready for the evening.

"And remember when she says it's time to go, then it's time to go, okay?" Estella reminded her daughter, as she placed a gentle kiss on top of her head. Lately, the little girl had been struggling with the concept of time, finding it difficult to comprehend phrases like 'five minutes till we go', which often resulted in a tantrum or tears of sorts.

"Let me know how it goes?" Stephanie diverted her attention to Estella as she slipped her own coat on.

"Yea I will, and thank you for looking after her on such short notice" Stella was truly grateful for Stephanie, she wasn't able to tell her much, she didn't know what she could and couldn't tell her yet. So all the red head knew was that this was a meeting to discuss the potential of using the cafe for a super high profile event of sorts. Estella hated that she couldn't tell Stephanie the whole truth but she didn't want to risk something this big before even having the opportunity.

The trio bid their goodbyes, and soon enough, Estella found herself alone in the small, cozy bookstore cafe. Taking a deep breath, she seized the moment to reflect on the turning point that awaited her. Would this opportunity be one her grandmother, the former owner, would embrace? Or would it become a prime example of her grandmother's complaints about the relentless march of modernisation?

Stella had been running the store on her own for a little over two years now, and no amount of time that went by made it any easier. The responsibility of running the store never felt entirely hers, she always had her grandmother in mind, and it never truly felt like she was the actual owner and the one needing to make business decisions moving forward. She always clung on to the fact that one day her grandmother would walk right back through the door and take over the reigns again. That all of this was just temporary, but the reality was it wasn't temporary. Estella was the primary owner of Book Loft and no matter how much she wished her grandmother would walk through the doors making a joke over the state of the place, she knew she wouldn't. The yearning for her grandmother's return seemed more like wishful thinking than an impending reality.

Shaking those thoughts out of her head she busied herself with cleaning behind the counter, making sure everything was ready for the next day. She had arranged for the publicist and the singer to be here for 5pm, it was now just 10 minutes shy and she could already feel the nerves building.

Questions raced through her mind. Would they delve into contracts today? Was today the day she'd make the final decision? Perhaps the singer would walk in and decide that Book Loft wasn't the right fit for her after all.

She didn't really know much about the singer herself, she wasn't one that was glued to social media gossip pages about celebrities, and she really couldn't care less about what they were doing on a day to day basis and what they were spending their money on, who they were seeing, who they were dating. It wasn't her world.