Beyond the Broken Angel

CHAPTER TWO

— the mystery and the tree —

July 17th, 2017

Giselle, age 20

GISELLE SAUNDERS HAD thought about that annoyingly handsome British boy many times over the years. When she was reminded of her trips to visit her Great Aunt Hester in England, his face always appeared in her mind.

Well, what was left of his face, that is. Time had eaten away at some of his features, leaving Giselle with a vague sense of what he looked like. Mostly, he was just a tall body with dark hair and a blur of a face.

But his eyes.

She could remember those eyes.

Dark green, framed by long, inky black lashes.

They stood out amongst the faceless being in her memory.

How could she forget them? They had stared at her with an amount of annoyance and scrutiny she had yet to come across again. They had infuriated her. But they had also enticed her, which wasn't surprising. She was thirteen when she had seen him last—any cute boy at that age that looked her way was enticing.

Though, even at twenty years of age, she wasn't sure if she had quite shaken her girlish fantasies. Maybe that was why he had shown up in her dream last night. Him and those eyes. Surrounded by cherry trees. Smiling at her.

Giselle had no reasoning for the dream other than the facts that she was back in England and that her father had mentioned something about there being a grove of cherry trees just beyond the woods.

Giselle and her father had talked yesterday about going sometime that afternoon, but that was before it turned sweltering hot and Hester asked Giselle to pick out weeds and spread new mulch into her flowerbeds.

For once, England felt a lot like southern Mississippi. Hot and humid. The normally overcast sky had only a few wisps of feathery clouds strewn across the bright blue, none of which blocked Giselle from the streams of fiery sunlight that plastered her hair to her brow and sent beads of sweat down her neck.

The muggy air only aided the heat, working like a tag team to make her strawberry blonde locks shrink from frizzy waves into frizzier curls.

She tried to ignore the heat like she normally did back in Mississippi, waiting for a cool breeze to come through as she hassled with Hester's flowerbeds.

In hindsight, Giselle was fairly certain the shrewd, old woman had waited until the hottest day of the year to give the girl a job outside. The old bat didn't like her, she could tell.

Hester never spoke to Giselle, or acknowledged her, or even tried with her. Giselle briefly debated coming out at night and painting the old woman's precious roses red. Poetic justice, and all that. None of the white roses were in bloom, but the pretty pink ones would work just fine.

"Hey, I got you some tea," Maxine Saunders called out to her daughter from the back porch, ripping Giselle away from her evil thoughts.

"It better be some good ole southern sweet tea or I'm not budging," Giselle yelled over her shoulder as she sat back on her haunches.

"Of course it is," Maxine said. "I used five cups of sugar and everything." Giselle heard her approaching, only turning around to look at her when she handed off the cold glass of tea. "Here."

"Thanks," Giselle managed to get out before greedily drinking the tea. She drank so much so fast that she gasped for air like a child once she was finished, handing the empty glass back to her mother.