Well, I finished this chapter a little early. Hope you like it :)

--VIVKELLER23

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"It's a darn shame," Tills muttered with a shake of his head.

The Sheriff assured her the cat had been dead before the psycho decided to hang it from a noose on their front porch. He shared the news as if that somehow made the act any less gruesome or the perpetrator any less crazy. As if knowing the animal hadn't suffered at the hands of such evil could erase the vivid image she saw every time she tried to get some sleep.

Jonah was furious. It was rage that fueled him hours later as caution tape was placed around their home. He couldn't stand still.

Collins shivered, watching the scene unfold from her seat on the truck bed. This was supposed to be their haven. They'd settled in the old cabin because of the privacy it offered them. But now it was tainted, as was everything else about Sailor's Port.

Who would go to such extremes to prove their hatred for her? Whoever hung the cat had also broken the front window and vandalized the living room wall. It had been a cold, calculated warning to her.

Watch your back. The message had been spray painted in vivid red. Secrets don't stay buried forever.

She wished she knew what secrets they were after. If that would have kept them from carrying out such a twisted scene, she'd have spilled everything in a heartbeat. Anything at all they wanted to know.

Sheriff Tills shook his head as Jonah roared something she didn't hear. A few other detectives worked around the two men, collecting samples. But something told Collins that they wouldn't find anything. Whoever had left them the message and the dead cat had wanted to remain anonymous. They'd been so careful in keeping the scene in order, picked up the shards of glass from the window they shattered, that no clues were left behind to help piece together a motive.

They were wasting their time, walking in circles around Jonah, and all she wanted was for the ringing in her ears to stop.

Collins shrugged off the blanket Jonah had placed around her shoulders and hopped off the truck. The sun was bright and unrelenting, but it's rays did nothing to warm the chill in her blood.

She wandered away from the house, dragging her feet on the old dirt road leading back towards town. Once or twice, she was distracted out of her heavy thoughts as cars sped down the road towards the crime scene.

Crime scene. Nothing worthwhile had occurred, at least nothing too serious. That was what she heard from the pieces of conversation she picked up from the investigators. But to her, everything had changed.

It was a strange feeling. She wasn't too sure she liked it. This overwhelming urge to shout and cry. The intense feeling of being betrayed, of being wronged. Nothing she'd ever owned had mattered so much to her that it would warrant such emotion, because she had never allowed herself to grow so attached to things that could be taken from her. But this? This wasn't just a thing she'd lost.

This was an attack on her by someone fueled by so much hatred. For her. That someone had trespassed the one place she'd always felt safe.

A group of ladies walked past, their laughter carried in the gentle breeze.

Collins blinked. She hadn't meant to walk so far without telling Jonah where she was going. And even if she had told her brother, she never would have willingly walked to the Brock house. Vance was the last person she wanted to see at the moment.

But she raised her hand to knock on the door anyway, as if her body knew all about the lies she told herself.

On the third knock, the door flung open.

Ice blue eyes greeted her. "I didn't order your share of drama today, Collins."

It was deja vu. She'd seen this already, lived it, and for the longest time, she'd believed she wouldn't ever have the strength to go through it again. Once had been enough.

But this time she didn't shatter the way she thought she would. No, this time, she was too shaken to give Alice the scene she obviously wanted.

Collins moistened her dry lips, and shrugged. "Old habits die hard, right?" Alice's eyelids flickered, her jaw clenched, but she said nothing. "I won't fight you for him. It's too much and, frankly, not worth the effort."

She crossed her arms, everything about her stance confrontational, but Collins wasn't interested in the game Alice wanted. "You finally admit defeat."

"I can't lose something I was never in the running for."

For a moment, Alice's taunting smile slipped. "You-" she cleared her throat, her eyes narrowed. "Pretty speech, but I don't care one way or the other."

"Then give him a message for me." She caught the way her cheeks colored, and backtracked. "Please. Tell him he was right. I should have never come to Sailor's Port. I should have stayed far away from him, from his sister."

Her heart wasn't breaking the way she imagined it would when she'd practiced saying the words she said now. It was soothing actually, to get that off her chest. To admit the things he'd said to her back then hadn't been all wrong. She just hadn't wanted to hear them.

"You're the kind of girl he should be around." Because Alice was crazy, and mean, and beautiful. But she'd never cause Vance any pain. She'd be happy to live out the rest of her life in town, on the arm of whatever man decided to give her the time of day.

As she turned to walk back down the road, she finally allowed herself to see the truth. No amount of replaying the past and dreaming would fix what really stood between them. Collins was too restless to settle somewhere she knew she wasn't wanted, and Vance was too stubborn to accept that.

Alice called her name, but Collins wasn't listening. The farther she walked away from the Brock house, the louder Vance's angry words got.

"I wish I'd never met you."

He'd shouted everything else that night, but those words had been a whisper. He'd said them, knowing he couldn't take them back, and the instant regret she'd seen on his face had cut her. He'd reached for her then, but the damage was done.

Looking back, his words hadn't been something new. She'd seen the same sentiment from countless people she walked past in town. Strangers who only knew of her had no problem letting her see how they disliked her. But Vance hadn't been a stranger, and what he'd said had meant more to her than the opinions of people she didn't care about.

Strange how sometimes she wished she could tell herself how much she yearned to be someone else.

"Collins, wait!"

That was odd. In all the times she'd gone back to replay the words Vance had said to her, she'd never cared about the last two.

Warm fingers grabbed her arm and spun her around.

"Why did you leave?" Vance demanded, furiously running a hand down his face as if he could wipe away the tension in his face. "You can't keep doing that, Collins. I can't keep up with you."

"You're the one who had Alice answer your door," she pointed out. "You're the one who's dancing with me and making promises one day, only to completely ignore me the next."

"Then tell me!" He released her arm and shoved his hands into his jean pockets. "Yell at me. You have every right to demand answers from me, but don't just push me away."

She shook her head. "I don't want to waste my breath. If Alice is who you want, stay with her." They'd already done this once, and it had ended horribly. She'd be every kind of stupid to repeat the same mistake. "But leave me out of it."

"Is that really what you want?"

"It's what is right, Vance."

His gray eyes blazed at her, seeing through her to the parts she was too afraid to look at herself. "Liar."

"No, I-"

"I messed it up. I hurt you, and I'm sorry." There was a tiny smile on his lips that gave away the sadness he felt with the memory. "I hurt myself, too, and instead of going after you that night, I packed my bags and left. But I was wrong."

How long had she cried herself to sleep at night, wondering why he hadn't stayed? "Vance."

"I was angry. At you for not trusting me, and at myself for ever putting you in a position to doubt me."

She didn't know what made her do it, but she held out a hand to him. For a second all he did was look at her like he couldn't believe she was there. But she wasn't going to run this time.

He grabbed her hand, intertwined their fingers, and started walking alongside her. "Alice isn't who I want."

Ah. Her heart started pounding a heavy rhythm in her chest. "I don't think she knows that."

"She does. Alice came to me on the night of the dance because she didn't know who else to go to, who else to trust." Vance's fingers tightened around hers before he forced himself to relax. "When you walked in and saw her in my room, you assumed the worst. But I should have made you listen instead of letting my pride take over."

Images flashed through her head like scenes from someone else's life that she'd only caught glimpses of. Alice with the sleeves of her dress undone, her mouth swollen, her mascara smudged around her eyes. In Vance's arms.

"Alice wasn't there to sleep with me, Collins. I doubt she'd ever want a man to touch her like that."

Her eyes flashed to his face. This was Alice Bone they were talking about.

Vance took a deep breath and let it out slowly. "Alice was almost taken advantage of by someone she thought she could trust. I was going to let her keep her secret until she was ready to tell it, but-"

"Who knows how long it would have taken you two idiots to get over your issues without honesty?" Alice finished.

Collins still wasn't sure she liked Alice, but she could appreciate her effort in trying to clear up the past.

vVv

Someone was singing to her. The melody was eerily familiar, but too vague for her to make the connection.

It was the same woman she'd seen many times before. She hummed the happy tune as she rocked back and forth on a porch bench. But this time Collins could see her clearly. She was beautiful with bright honey-toned eyes that reminded her of sunshine and warmth. There were lines on her face that only appeared with age, and when she smiled, her whole appearance changed with it.

Suddenly, the sky grew cloudy. It happened so quickly this time that she hardly had the chance to catch her breath. The room swirled, the woman vanished. Cold water rushed over her, pulling her under before she was ready.

She drowned. Again.

With a gasp, Collins came awake.

The room was bathed in darkness with a sliver of moonlight offering just enough light for her to see. The floral wallpaper on the walls threw her off for a moment as if she hadn't completely come awake yet. With her arm she felt around until she felt the lamp on the bedside table. She pulled the chain.

The shadows disappeared. She blinked for a few seconds, allowing her eyes to adjust to the new brightness in the room. The mint and pink colored walls caused her physical pain as she tried to remember where the plain white walls she preferred had gone.

And then she saw the pictures. So many of them, and still not enough to capture the shared moments of a too short life.

Regina Brock had hated the room. It was the one place in the Brock house that had remained unchanged over the years. Maryanne Mansard-Brock, Vance and Regina's mother, had once walked the halls of the house and left her quirky touch in every room. Since she'd divorced Mayor Brock and left town, the home had slowly been stripped of any memory of hers. Except for this room- the master bedroom.

It seemed even the mayor wasn't able to return to the bedroom he'd once shared with his wife. Perhaps it was too painful for him.

Whatever the reason, Collins found herself feeling out of place in a bed that wasn't her own.

The past several hours came rushing over her in waves. She recalled the break in and the anonymous warning left at her home. Pieces of the conversation she'd had with Vance played in her head almost as if from a distance. She remembered Alice and struggled to accept that the other girl wasn't the villain she'd made her out to be.

How was it that everything she thought she knew could change in seconds?

For over a year, she'd been so certain that Alice Bone played a huge part in ruining her life. She'd managed to place the blame on her, choosing to believe that Alice had sabotaged the one good thing she'd had in Sailor's Port. And it had helped to have someone to loathe almost as much as Collins loathed herself.

But Alice had only been a victim in the midst of a bigger problem. That problem was an avalanche waiting to wipe out anyone that was in its way.

"Was once not enough?"

Collins shivered as those furious words echoed, their meaning finally settling in. Vance's anger at Principal Flannigan the day of Regina's funeral made sense now that she knew the context. Alice had been Flannigan's first victim, and Vance was convinced his father had played a role in covering the incident up.

She hadn't known what to say when Alice told her the events of that night. How frightened she'd been. How absolutely sure she'd been that if she went to anyone else with her story, they wouldn't believe her.

So much time wasted, and it could have been avoided if she'd offered to listen rather than accuse.

She threw the pastel colored covers off of her and tiptoed out into the hall. Too much was going through her mind for her to settle back to sleep. With a skill she'd mastered the numerous times she and Regina had snuck out of the house during their sleepovers, Collins made her way out the glass doors to the treehouse.

She didn't know how long she lay on her back on the bright floor just counting the stars in the sky. It might have been ages, maybe only seconds. But before she was so caught up in the peacefulness of the night that her mind didn't register at first that she wasn't alone.

Her eyes snapped to the shadowy figure watching her from the treehouse's doorway, her fists raised as if she knew how to use them. "Who's there?"

"Didn't your brother teach you to scream if you were ever in a dangerous situation?" Vance asked, but there was a teasing note in his voice.

"You followed me."

He moved deeper into the treehouse. She saw him shrug. "I couldn't sleep."

"My problem isn't that I can't sleep," Collins told him. There was something about being awake when everyone else was dead asleep. The night offered that cloak of security that made her feel brave enough to share her darkest secrets. "It's the stuff I see when I sleep that bothers me."

Vance sat down beside her, his eyes intent on her face. "What do you see?"

"Pieces of a life I must have wanted at some point as a child," she explained. "At least, that's what I've been told. It's those dreams that have made me so terrified of water. I've internalized this fear that somehow they're a premonition of what could happen to me."

"That's why you never learned to swim?"

Collins nodded. "Jonah tried to slowly teach me to swim, but I couldn't do it. I'd freeze and my lungs would refuse to function."

Vance was silent, waiting.

"I drown," she told him, as if that explained everything. "Every time. No matter how differently the dream starts, the end is always the same."

"Well, how does it normally start?"

Collins relaxed and lay back down. Her eyes watched the sky through the skylight in the treehouse's roof as she told him of her dreams. She'd only shared them with two other people before, but Vance was the only one who didn't try to press her to decipher the pieces and make a whole picture. He just listened while she described the storm, the woman, the water, and the eventual return to reality.

"It's strange," Collins said. "Up until recently, no one I knew had ever been in my dream. But the day we visited your sister's grave, I saw Regina."

"I see her, too," Vance whispered. "Almost every night."

That made her heart hurt. "I wish she'd let me know how she was feeling."

The pictures she'd passed on her way out had shown the girl she remembered, the one who'd loved to sing even if she couldn't carry the correct tune. The girl who'd laughed at her own jokes and learned to bake from Miss Susannah because her real mother hadn't stayed long enough to teach her.

"I wish I'd tried harder to reach her and make her see that she wasn't alone."

She hadn't known she was crying. It wasn't until Vance ran his thumb along her cheek to wipe away her tears that she realized.

"You aren't alone either, Collins."

But she feared it was her nature to push those closest to her away even when all she wanted was to hold onto them. She'd lost too many for her not to see that.

So Collins pulled away this time. She needed to change the course their conversation had taken. "This isn't about-"

She lost her train of thought.

How had they ended up on their sides staring at each other rather than the night sky? She didn't remember moving. But suddenly Vance was all she could see, all she wanted to see.

And the way he looked at her as he leaned in close to rest his forehead against hers, she could believe she was all he wanted to see, too.

--

how are we feeling?