Chapter 21

• As she wandered through the trees, she congratulated herself for not shaking in her shoes. It was daylight, but the area she had wandered into was dark enough that it could have been night. Each time she lowered the camera away from her face and took a few steps, she would see something else that she had to take a picture of. It was truly breathtaking here, the dark woods with a few rays of light shining down through the canopy of leaves.
• Memories she thought had long ago faded from came back. The hiking trips with her parents who had loved the outdoors. She always wondered why they had settled in Chicago. Lush, wild forests weren’t exactly common there. She really wished they were still here, now when she needed them. More than once since she’d made the choice to pack her life into the car, thoughts of her parents returned. Had her father known about Aiden’s business? He had worked for that family for as long as she could remember. Her soft-handed, soft-hearted father, could he have known? She would never find those answers, and that added to the confusing mess inside his head.
• Letting the camera drop and hang on the cord around her neck she swatted at the bugs buzzing in front of her nose. Not everything here was beautiful, these mosquitoes were the size of moths, and it didn’t seem to matter how much spray she put on, they just kept coming. “Mean and determined, aren’t you?” She fished around in her bag for the spray and pulled it out. Instead of spraying her face again, because if she digested much more of this she was going to be sick, she blasted the swarm of insects in front of her. Frowning as she lowered the bottle to see that had helped for only a few short seconds. “It’s time to find some sunlight and leave you nasty things behind.” Rayne turned around in a circle, picking which way to go.