Three and Half Weeks Earlier:
"Aurora!"
Aurora looked up, squinting under the bright rays of the sun to look at Jamie as she sat next to her on the porch. Aurora returned to the book in her lap. "Oh. Hey."
Jamie huffed and frowned. "Ugh. Seriously, is that any way to treat your best friend?"
Aurora laughed at Jamie’s pouting expression. “Aw, you poor thing-come here, you big baby,” She said, enveloping her in an embrace.
Jamie harrumphed, “You are so not cute.”
Aurora’s mouth twitched, suppressing a smile.
Aurora had been on her own since she was eighteen, with deceased parents and no other relatives, living as a hermit, closed off from the world.
Jamie was her only friend. Varneil was the backwoods of the state of Virginia. Very few and separated houses surrounded by woods a few miles away from city and Jamie's house was the only house anywhere near to Aurora's.
Aurora had lived in the area for a little over a year. She wanted a fresh start and had been independent from a young age due to the early loss of both her parents who had died in a car crash her at the end of her sophomore year of high school, while she survived without a scratch.
It took many months for the pain and loneliness to ease after their passing, but it was never entirely gone, a phantom ghost that haunts her thoughts which hung above her head every now and then.
Sometimes she felt like a gaping hole opened up in her heart when she dwelt on the past, especially the incident after the death of her parents once she had moved in with her mother’s close friend, Natalie, who she kept in touch by phone call once in a while.
It was the at the beginning of her junior year of high school, when she was 16, that the young promising senior athlete of her school, Trey Lakely who was 18 and an all-star quarterback of the football team in the small town she had lived in, took notice; had been watching her with far too much interest.
He would send her threatening messages. He followed her one night on the way home while she was walking, until he finally caught her alone. No matter how hard she fought, she couldn’t shake him.
Aurora was raped the same night, and she never spoke up except for one time to the town police and no one believed her because they all knew and loved Trey Lakely “the golden boy”- so who would believe her?
However; Trey Lakely ended up with bad karma because about a week later she heard on the news that he had been drunk driving and died on the way to the hospital from a car accident, he had driven straight into a telephone pole.
She didn’t go to the funeral and avoided anyone that knew Trey Lakely after, and she lived with Natalie quietly until she could stand on her own.
Her mother’s friend Natalie had been well off with money, and took care of Aurora until she graduated and moved away, keeping her silence, unwilling to cause Natalie trouble. So Aurora left quietly with a hug and a smile for goodbye. And, that was eight years ago.
