Chapter 4

The whistle on the electric kettle went off like a siren, jolting Elena back to the present, and for a few minutes she busied herself making a small pot of tea, but the memories of the past came rushing back to the fore when she sat down at the well scrubbed wooden table with her cup of coffee in front of her.

She did not think that she would ever forget the day, when she was told her grandmother had cancer. The doctor had given Lucy Landry a year to live, and, with special treatment, perhaps two or three. Elena had suddenly found herself in a position where she had to make the most difficult decision of her life. She had loved Stephan with her life, and she desperately wanted to marry him, but she could not go away with him and leave the woman who had raised her since she was six after the tragic death of her parents. Her parents had been killed by a drunk driver at a traffic intersection on their way to pick her up from her granny’s. Since then, her life changed, and Lucy became her everything.

Elena drank her coffee and tried to relax, but those long-buried memories would give her no peace, and she was forced to recall those last few weeks in Sea city before Stephan’s departure for America. She had been forced to make a traumatic decision, and if Stephan had noticed anything different about her, then he had not mentioned it. The problem was, perhaps, that she had known him too well.

If she had told him the truth he might have forfeited the opportunity to go to America in order to stay with her, but Elena had known that she could not allow him to sacrifice his career for her sake. Stephan was meant for greater heights in his profession as a neuro-surgeon, and her mind, if not her heart, had told her that she was the one who would have to make the sacrifice.

She felt the perspiration break out on her forehead at the memory of her predicament. She had been incapable of facing Stephan and saying the words which she knew had to be said. He would have known that she was lying, so she had to resort to writing him a letter. It had taken her days to compose something which she had hoped would ease the hurt for him, but in the end she had realized that there was no nice way of breaking off their engagement, and she had severed their relationship in a few brief words which had sliced deep into her own soul.

She had added her engagement ring to the letter in the envelope, she had sealed it carefully, and she had had it delivered by hand to Stephan’s room in the city, but, by the time he received it, she had left Sea city with her grandmother on a holiday from which they did not return until she had heard that Stephan had left the country.

That had been five years ago, and Damien Quinn was the only one who had known the truth. He had been someone she could trust, someone she could confide in, and she had known that he would never reveal her secret to anyone who might unwittingly pass it on to Stephan.

Lucy Landry had lived a little more than two years and, after her death, Elena had sold the house which had been her home for so many years. She had wanted to get away, and Mystic Falls had seemed the ideal place for her at the time. She had needed to regain her inner peace, and the tranquility of this small town had given her that … and more.

Elena poured herself a second cup of coffee and got up to fetch the headache pills which she had kept in the kitchen dresser. Her head was throbbing, and she gulped down two tablets with a mouthful of water.