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Chapter 2: Geraniums
The scent took her right back to that deep hole of loneliness.
Brie paused before entering the old church, now a neighborhood venue. The geraniums: darkest red with a musky smell, framing the door in large matching pots. The scent from the loneliest time in her life. The scent always took her back to the feeling of despair, of being hopelessly alone.
When she’d been arrested she was detained in an empty room, and the scent came to her then. There were no geraniums in that cellblock, only isolation. But that was enough to bring on the clenched feeling in her gut, and with it the memory of the scent of being alone. Alone and under the control of others.
Julian, who’d met her at University Station, touched her arm. “Are you all right, Brie?”
She came out of it. Remembered where she was and what she was expected to do there. “I’m fine. Fine. How big a group do we have?”
“I was expecting fifty. But they tell me we’ve got over a hundred inside.”
The irony was clear to her. Her biggest childhood fear was loneliness; the geraniums had reawakened the fear. But in a moment she was going to walk through a crowd of people who were looking to her for support, for insight, for guidance.
Brie stepped into the room. The vaulted ceiling. The evenly spaced windows on both…
