WHO: Beth Phillips WHEN: Her bedroom WHERE: Late on January 9 SUMMARY: Beth dreams about burning letters. WARNINGS: None
When Beth woke, she could feel too much.
Her eyes still closed, it felt as though the smoke of the burning letters was still lingering in the air. She could smell it there, almost feel the heat of the fire on her skin. One letter after another, the first having come so soon after that ball that her sister had introduced her to him at. The others spanning years, documenting a courtship and separation as he aided in a war. There were letters from after their marriage, some that had even been recent. She had kept them, each stoking the love in her heart, just as they now stoked the fire that destroyed them.
Her heart ached. She could feel it, almost like a physical injury. She had loved him, given him anything that she could, and she hadn't been enough.
It was as her thoughts lingered on that particular pain that Beth's eyes fluttered open. She wasn't sitting, ridding the world of any evidence that would tell those future historians more about her than she wanted to allow. No, she was just laying in her bed -- alone, save for Rio, who was sleeping soundly in the otherwise vacant space beside to her.
Beth had dreamed so much of Eliza's life. Too many moments were painful and difficult to shake and this certainly qualified as one of them. It wasn't just that she felt everything that Eliza felt as though the emotions were her own. It was because she didn't have to feel Eliza's emotions so viscerally to know how they felt. She had lived it. She had come home one day to have her husband tell her just what he had been doing. She knew what it was to be heartbroken and to feel as though she just hadn't been enough for the person she loved most. It hurt.
And though she had come a long way since that night when Beth had torn out of their home and drove to Kesi's, where she called Angie from the driveway and tried to tell her what had happened between sobs and hysterics, it still hurt. Therapy and a lot of self-reflection had allowed her to accept that while the end of her marriage might have been painful, it wasn't the end of her world, either. It had been the end of one chapter and she had been standing at the start of another, with it completely up to her as to how that chapter would read. She had taken control of her life, taken control of her narrative. She was a better person for it.
But still, on nights like these, where she was forced to relive Eliza's heartache that only reminded her so terribly much of her own… it hurt.