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Date: 9 January 2020 4.53 a.m.
Subject: Re: Still awake.
We’re going to have to do something about your tendency to run yourself down. It needs to stop. Because recurrent dreams do not make someone crazy, Catherine. Neither does finding a picture online that looks like the hut from those dreams. I’m sure there’s dozens of backcountry huts all over the country that look similar.
J xx
Reading his email, her heart plummeted. He didn’t believe her! Not that she expected him to, not really. Why would he? First of all, she emailed him out of the blue, after having no contact with him for more than a decade, then she told him she’d found the exact hut online that she’d been dreaming about for years. He might be doing a better job of hiding it than Steve did, but he clearly thought she was messed up, too. She sat there speechless for a moment, and then she typed out a short, to-the-point response. Because she had to know. If he didn’t believe her…
To: Jason Oliver
From: Catherine Richardson
Date: 9 January 2020 4.58 a.m.
Subject:Re: Still awake.
Don’t you believe me?
She hit the green arrow to send the message flinging off through cyber space. “There you go,” she whispered. “The make or break email.” Because she knew, without a doubt, that if Jason didn’t believe her, just as Steve hadn’t believed her, she had to end things now, before she started hoping for a future together.
She held her breath, not daring to move a muscle, waiting expectantly for his email, but also trying to brace herself for the possibility that it may not come. Maybe she really had chased him away with her craziness.
Just as her lungs were starting to cry out for oxygen, the phone beeped and vibrated in her hands and she quickly opened the message.
To: Catherine Richardson
From: Jason Oliver
Date: 9 January 2020 4.59 a.m.
Subject: Of course
I believe you. Of course I do! I was simply wondering if it was possible that you had been to a similar hut, because that would be a logical explanation. But if you’re sure that’s the one, then I believe you. Send me the link to it :)
J xx
Catherine breathed a sigh of relief. He believed her! But then she frowned.How can there possibly be a logical explanation for all this?A recurring dream that she’d had for years, where a man she didn’t know called her name, that had intensified the very day she started reading the family tree her sister had sent? How could there be a logical explanation for the gut feeling that told her the dream, the hut, and Catherine Craig’s mysterious disappearance on their family tree were all linked? Either she was crazy, or her gut feeling was true. There was no logical explanation, or middle ground. Not the way she saw it, anyway. If he truly believed her, he had to stop searching for one. Some things just couldn’t be explained with logic and reason.
Happy that he was willing to believe her, she sent him the link to the hut and several minutes later he replied:
To: Catherine Richardson
From: Jason Oliver
Date: 9 January 2020 5.07 a.m.
Subject: Book it!
Let’s go there! You book it, I’ll go with you. Well, after we meet up, if we both want to, of course. But listen, I have to get to work. I think we need to meet, today if possible. You do as I asked last night, and I’ll email again at breakfast.
J xx
“So bossy,” she muttered, but she smiled. His bossiness was what she needed right now. She was a mess and she knew it. There was no order to her life; she was just flailing around in a black hole, getting herself mired in deeper every day. Jason was the most disciplined man she knew, and she was certain he could help her, if she let him.
CHAPTER3
She could feel someone watching her as she pulled up in front of the café and parked next to a muddy green Pajero with ‘Jason Oliver Equestrian’ written on the side. It was a little place in the middle of nowhere, just sitting all by itself on the side of the state highway. Roughly halfway between her place and his. It was well out of the city, which was good, because she couldn’t face going into the city. Not anymore. The city she’d loved for so many years, the city that had been her home, now felt like a prison. The people, the vibrancy that she’d thrived on, now terrified her. Even now, so far from it with barely anyone around, she was nervous. She wiped her sweaty palms on the front of her pants and tried to ignore the anxiety that had settled in a ball right there in the pit of her stomach.
