Sincerely, Red

Chapter Twenty Five

"I'll wake Lucas up," she said. "You can go and get dressed now. I've got to call that annoying woman he was staying with." Claire sighed loudly. "She's been threatening to call the police, because he's been staying with us. The next time I see her, I'll probably attack her because she's working my last nerve."

I smiled slightly and walked towards the door, but stopped just outside it. Then I turned around to look back at her. "Claire?" I called. My hands were clutching the doorframe as she looked up. "I love you."

"I love you too, sweetheart," she said, smiling back. "But you've really got to get a move on. We'll be late if we don't watch the time. It travels too fast."

I nodded and walked upstairs, brushed my teeth and then sat down on the bed almost robotically. It was the room I had stayed in when I'd been living with David. Everything was catching up with me now, and I realised that I'd never just sat down and took it all in at once. So much had happened from losing my memory to Tim being convicted, yet none of it had produced anything other than a numb feeling. Now, my emotions were alive and were ranging from loss and anger to happiness and peace. I realised that we could finally move on with our lives now, because everything had come to an end. It really had.

I smiled as I thought of this, slipping into a black dress that reached just past my knees. There was a matching cardigan laid out onto the bed and it looked as though it would reach my waist. It seemed as though Claire had put all of her energy into sorting things out, so that her mind would focus on anything other than what had happened. I wondered if she would ever really deal with her emotions. Then another part of me wondered if she had already done that and that was why she was so strong.

"Liv, I've got breakfast!" David shouted from downstairs. "Get it while it's still warm!"

I hurried downstairs and slipped into the kitchen, only to find Claire cutting her pancakes into neat little triangles and eating them one by one. David was looking at her as though what she was doing was unnatural. When he noticed me, he handed me a plate with two pancakes and some lemon syrup. Apparently, he'd made it and I found that it wasn't as bad as Claire had made it out to be. David wasn't a perfect cook by any means, but it was nice sharing an average meal with everyone else there.

Lucas joined us, making a similarly disgusted face when he saw Claire's triangles. "That's unnatural," he said, most likely echoing David's earlier thoughts. "You can't cut a pancake. You can roll it and you can stuff it into your mouth, but you can't cut it. You'll hurt its feelings."

"It's a pancake," she said, stressing the word and glaring at him. "It doesn't have feelings and I'm not going to stuff it into my mouth. That would be absolutely disgusting."

He offered her a crooked smile, even if it didn't completely reach the rest of his face.

"Yeah, okay," he muttered. "Let's just eat. Liv, can you pass the syrup?"

I did as he asked, and noticed that he was wearing a grey, sleeveless jumper over a white shirt. I was almost certain that he'd picked his own clothes. Claire would have picked something super smart for no other reason than to look professional and cool. He muttered a "thanks" quietly, as his hands came in contact with the bottle, but refused to look directly at me.

"We've got about an hour, but it'll take us another half hour to get there," Claire informed us all. "We should probably set out soon."

"Why do they call it the town hall when it's almost in the next town?" I asked. "That seems a bit stupid."

No one had an answer for that so everyone went back to eating their breakfast. The food wasn't really touched though, just swept around our plates. No one was really hungry, with their thoughts all focused on what they were going to say. I could almost guarantee that Lucas was rehearsing a number of lines in his head, even though he'd said he wouldn't write a speech. He was probably freaking out right about now, hoping that he wouldn't freeze when the time came.