All that is Darkness

CHAPTER FOURTEEN: CHLOE HAVERSHAW

I was going into my second year at Humberton Academy when my past caught up with me. Up until that point I'd actually begun to think my life had become ordinary—or as ordinary as it could get, under the circumstances. I lived in relative obscurity, one among several hundreds of students attending the school, doing nothing to draw attention to myself. When not there, I lived in Caelo with an old acquaintance of Mom's.

"I know this man," she had said, a few days after our escape from Jasmine. "We met back before you were born. He works for the police, and... and Uncle Jim and I have arranged for you to go live with him and his wife. They've agreed to look after you while you go to Humberton."

There'd been no arguing the point, though I'd certainly made a valiant attempt. But from the start I'd been waging an unwinnable war, because if there was anyone more stubborn than I was, it was Mom. And when all was said and done, she was the parent and I was the child; it doesn't take a genius to figure out who was going to come out on top in that one.

"It's for the best, sweetheart," Mom had insisted. "You'll be safer this way, and maybe you can finally have something of a normal life."

So I'd become the niece of William and Evelyn Havershaw (Uncle Bill and Aunt E), just one more in the litany of identities I'd assumed over the course of my brief existence. And for all that I hated being apart from Mom, for all that I had bitterly asserted it wasn't fair and that I'd never accept it, I had to admit that coming to Caelo hadn't been an onerous imposition. I'd always wanted to visit the city, to see the place where Mom had been born, to walk the streets she'd once walked and imagine the way her life had been before it had gone bonkers.

In many respects the city had become more of a home to me than any place I'd lived in before. The only thing better would have been to have shared it with the most important person in my life. I had never thought we'd ever be parted from one another, but now our only contact was through weekly phone calls: moments when Mom would assure me she was doing fine—though over the phone I could tell our forced separation hurt her even more than it did me, and that the longer it persisted the more difficult it would be for her.

"One day this will all be over," she kept telling me. "And then we'll be together again. We'll have a house in Caelo and I'll show you all my favorite haunts. I'll show you where I grew up and my old flat and the stores I used to shop at and the library I worked in."

Yet each week the possibility of that reunion grew more distant and I began to doubt it would ever happen and grew increasingly worried about my mother's welfare the longer we were apart. She was out there on her own and the people who'd been hunting us before hadn't stopped looking. "The important thing is making sure you're safe," she'd say, dismissing my concerns. "So I'm going to keep moving about, keep them after me if I can. But you don't have to worry about it. I'll be all right. You know I can take care of myself."

But I did worry. I could still see Mom as she'd been that last time we'd seen each other, me in the car with Uncle Jim, looking back at her as she stood in the middle of the road, just outside the cottage on the naval base. She was so fragile and alone, dressed in a simple white summer frock, the sea at her back, a hand raised, waving. And I'd known there were tears in her eyes; and when she must have thought I was too far away to see, she'd fallen to her knees, covering her face with her hands, her body shaking.

It was a powerful statement of how great a sacrifice she'd made.

"I don't want to lose you," Mom had said just before I left. "I always thought I could keep you safe, that we could stay one step ahead of them. I never thought they'd get as close as they did. But I was wrong, sweetheart. I was wrong and because of that I almost lost you." She had gathered me in her arms, holding me as if afraid she'd lose me forever if she let go. "Oh, darling, if only you knew how much you mean to me. That's why you have to go. I could never live if anything happened to you. You're all I have in this world. All I have that's right and good, and life wouldn't mean anything without you. So please, sweetheart...please do this for me."