~~Young~~

Chapter Twenty

   He couldn’t decide how that made him feel.

  There were a few more documents in regards to Sera’s ‘escape’ from several other girls’ homes sitting in the box, along with letters of recommendation from those running the facilities to Sera’s parents that she may be better off enrolled in another, distant, facility.

   That was his girl, causing trouble wherever she went in her youth.

   He was still grinning at that fact when he realized the dates on the letters. They were all from the nineteen eighties, over a decade before Josephine was born.

   “How…where did you get these from?” he questioned her, “from her records here?”

   She gave him a shy smile and reached for the lid of the box. From in between the liner and the box itself she pulled out a small pink envelope. It was yellowed some from time, its corners worn down but it was complete, the card inside being preserved perfectly. She handed it over with reservations though, the fear evident as she wrung her hands together.

   Embossed on the pink cardstock, just beneath the pink silk bow tied to the top, in silver lettering was the cheerful message, “It’s a girl!” It was Sera’s birth announcement. Gage looked to Josephine with wary eyes before rereading the card. But no, the words were the same, “Seraphine Turner, born the seventh day of August nineteen- eighty five”. He picked up the envelope; it had never been addressed, never mailed. Only a return address was printed on the front, not even a stamp. He looked again to Josephine, her head was hung and she faced the floor, her hands still knotted together.

   She had stolen this birth announcement, he realized. And if he was to take a guess by the quality of its preservation he would say it was done right in front of Sera’s mother while she was at her desk, yet she had been none the wiser. No one was when the angels were among them, it was their MO. And it wasn’t unheard of for them to take trinkets of those they took an interest in, Gage was very aware of this, but it all pointed to only one answer.

   She was Sera’s guardian angel.

   But what would make her give up her power in heaven to walk the earth as a mortal? An angel had much more influence over their chosen mortal’s life when their presence was that of the existential, not of the flesh. She had stifled her power by taking this form. And God, well, he suppressed any mortal power by condemning her to such a body.

   “Why would you do such a thing?” he asked appalled, “you had to know he wasn’t going to let you go that easy, that…that this was how you would end up.”

   Her answer to Gage’s harsh words was to go to another box below her bed. This time she did not ask him to retrieve it, simply tore the cover off and sat beside it on the floor, digging furiously through it. He could see only medical papers from where he sat perched on her bed, but after a moment she snapped her gaze to his, holding another letter out to him. It was her enrollment at this boarding school. He didn’t understand the connection and asked her as such. To which she pointed to the date, then to the pile of papers beside him regarding Sera.

   “I…” he shook his head, “I don’t understand.”

   There was frustration in her eyes, her disability getting the best of her in this moment when Gage continued to be baffled by what she was trying to tell him. That was when she came to Sera yes, but how was that an explanation?

   She spun on her bare heel and went for a cluttered desk set before a grand window. She snatched a pad and pencil from its disorder and while still standing scrawled furiously across it. The sparse black and white picture she turned to him was that of a long haired figure lying crumpled on the ground. When he shook his head again Josephine added more detail, shading in places for contrast, more lines, more objects. Okay, so it was a woman, but her hair obscured her face to her identity. She was lying beside a stairwell it looked like, a pile of cloth, or maybe blankets beside her on the floor her couldn’t tell.