Gaia's Lover by Zoe Cannon

Author:Zoe Cannon [Cannon, Zoe]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Zoe Cannon
Published: 2022-01-22T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

She found herself a pond to wash in. The water was cloudy and brackish, and cold enough that her fingers and toes were blue by the time she got out. Whatever Gaia had said about always being with her, she felt the abandonment all over again as soon as the bite of cold hit her body. She kept on feeling it as she sat naked and shivering by the water’s edge, waiting for her clothes to dry.

But the water got the worst of the dirt and stink off her, and off her clothes. That meant when she hiked to the nearest downtown and walked into the small library, they didn’t kick her out at first sight—or, as would have been more likely, at first whiff. She got a few strange looks, probably from the smell of pond water that clung to her, or the tangled bird’s nest her hair had turned into. But now she was only an eccentric, someone strange and possibly unbalanced and best to be avoided, not an affront to the senses. And if people wanted to avoid her, so much the better. There was only one person she was interested in.

The squat one-room library was a far cry from the two-story Middlebridge library she had always thought was small. It had a single computer, wedged into the far corner behind the reference books. Allie paged through a dictionary and pretended to be engrossed in the etymology of the words influence through infrastructure while she waited for the computer to free up. That part took the better part of an hour. Once she actually sat down at the computer, though, she only needed fifteen minutes. There were five Virginia Reeves that she could find. Three had publicly visible social media accounts. And of those three, only one of them had long black hair.

Of course she didn’t put her home address on her social media. But Allie didn’t need that. All she needed was Virginia’s hometown and where she worked. She was a lawyer at a small two-person firm, it looked like, which made Allie raise her eyebrows—what had made Gaia choose a lawyer, of all people? Being replaced would have been bad enough without the added insult of knowing Gaia’s next choice had been someone like her sister. Someone whose head was too full of money and ambition and making it big to think about stopping by the side of the road to run her hands through the grass. What could Gaia see in someone like that? Unless Gaia, like her family, was tired of all the ways Allie didn’t measure up.

A quick lookup on a map told her Virginia’s hometown was two hundred miles away. Not all that far, when she considered the scale on which Gaia thought, and the fact that Gaia could just as easily have chosen someone on the other side of the world. Allie tried to focus on that part, and not think too hard about how long it would take her to travel those two hundred miles.

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