The Rose Town

1: Rosewood

1: Rosewood

Point Of View ~ Annalise

*****

Annalise McCarthy watched the last remnants of her cigarette burn away on the pavement before squashing it beneath her toe. The scent and taste of tar, smoke and nicotine still lingered in her mouth and nose, and she huffed it out.

If her mother were with her, she would probably chew her out for littering and tell her to put the stub in the trash. As it happened, her mother wasn't with her, and there were no bins around.

Annalise only felt slightly guilty about littering, but she really couldn't be bothered to go hunting for a dumpster. Plus, she had to admit that she had the faint urge to spite her mother, and littering seemed like a good way to accomplish that without doing anything drastic.

She sighed and leaned against her suitcase. The evening sun was setting over the train station, and the amount of people milling about the station was dwindling. Soon she would likely be the last person left. Her father was supposed to have arrived an hour ago, when the train she'd ridden had first pulled into the station, but he was late - which, in truth, wasn't a big surprise. Seamus McCarthy wasn't a person to be relied on.

The last time Annalise had seen her father was two years ago. He had visited her and her mother in their flat in London for Christmas. He hadn't said much to her except to congratulate her on her good grades - which was very telling, because Annalise hadn't earned any good grades. Then he had packed off back home to his lonely town in the middle of nowhere.

Annalise was currently travelling to aforementioned lonely town. She hadn't set foot in the town of Rosewood since she was two years old, but she knew that her father's side of the family had lived there for generations.

Her parents had never married. They'd met when her father was visiting London after finishing university, and her mother, Joanne Greene, had been waitressing tables. She'd fallen in love with his Oxford-educated melancholia and he'd whisked her away to his large inherited house in the town of Rosewood. Joanne had soon become pregnant with Annalise, at which point Seamus had written his first bestselling novel. For two years, as Annalise grew into a toddler, Seamus earned more and more fame through his writing career. Eventually, Joanne decided that Seamus loved his books more than he loved his partner and child, and she'd taken Annalise, moved back to London, and never looked back.

Until now, of course.

Annalise resisted the urge to light another cigarette as she waited for Seamus to arrive. She'd long since given up chain smoking, and relegated herself to one cigarette a day. Not even being exiled from London by her inattentive mother could make her give up that rule.

Annalise had always seemed to be prone to getting herself into trouble, and now, after sixteen years, her mother had decided that she'd had enough. Joanne Greene was a self-proclaimed stressed workaholic, and apparently having an erratic teenage daughter didn't seem to help. The last straw had happened three weeks before the summer holidays, when Annalise had been caught making out with one of her teachers. To be fair, he was a student teacher, and was only nineteen. That didn't seem to matter to the school board, or to her mother. So now, Annalise had been sent to live with her father for her second-last year of school. If she behaved, she would be allowed to return to London for her final year of school.

By now, the sun had almost set, and the train station was almost deserted. Annalise was beginning to give up hope that her father would ever show up, when finally a car came rumbling into the car park of the station. Seamus McCarthy emerged from the driver's side and came hurrying towards her.