Dreams of Fire (Maple Hill Chronicles Book 1) Read Online Free PDF Page B

wasn’t fat, but he always treated her as if she would blow up if she ate cookies and ice cream. His family was inclined to overeating and heaviness, not hers. Her mom was not fat, and her dad hadn’t been when he was alive.
    Marianne stared moodily at the mess in the living room and steadily emptied the pint container one bite at a time. Their marriage hadn’t been perfect, but it had worked. They’d met in college when their futures had been bright, his in business and hers in historic research. He was so handsome and charismatic. She’d been amazed that he’d wanted to spend time with her. She hadn’t thought of herself as particularly pretty, but he’d made her feel special. They’d truly enjoyed each other’s company, and when he asked her to marry him, she’d been overjoyed. They’d moved to the city and made a life together each having promising careers and spending their free time seeing shows and taking trips into the country for romantic getaways. The first couple of years had been a little tight financially. For some reason Geoffrey’s parents had insisted he do everything on his own. When things were too tight, her mom’s discreet financial help had filled the gap.
    For a long while, she’d been content, and she’d attributed her lack of joy to a tough work schedule or local politics or the war in the Middle East, rather than something closer to home. Marianne had dutifully played her part, making a million meals, washing a million clothes, and gradually spending less and less time with him having any kind of fun. Geoffrey took care of all their finances and gradually took over their social lives as his career at the retail company had soared, and he’d needed to entertain or travel or stay late. Eventually, he’d made six figures at his company, but his habit of self-promotion turned into outright denigration of her. She’d lost herself along the way, becoming subsumed by his needs.
    The only thing he’d let her do entirely for herself was to take classes at Columbia and earn her doctorate. He must have figured it added to his prestige, she thought resentfully. After that, when she wanted something, he’d frown and talk her out of it, calmly and reasonably. Eventually, she quit trying.
    When she was a little girl, she’d sometimes had dreams that came true. The earliest one she could remember was in third grade. She’d woken up one morning feeling elated after a dream but couldn’t recall the details. Later that day, her teacher told her that her artwork was to be featured on the winter concert program cover. When she was twelve, she dreamt her Grandmother Selene was crying at a funeral. She dreamt about the funeral twice more over the next week and then her mom told her that Grandpa Clare had died of a heart attack. Her own father had died of pneumonia when she was little, and she barely remembered him. Mercifully, she hadn’t had any anticipatory dreams about losing him. It was hard enough that she’d grown up without him.
    Her dreams scared her at first, but over time she learned to tell the difference between those that were random and those that were likely to be harbingers of events to come or things that were happening somewhere else. Those kinds repeated themselves until she got the message. Sometimes she wondered if the true dreams were messages from her own subconscious about things observed but ignored. Maybe her dreams were similar to the way a camera records bits of background that go unnoticed until a closer viewing of the actual picture. In reality, most of her dreams hadn’t come true. As she grew older, they grew fewer and farther apart.
    Two years ago she had a series of unusual dreams. They implied that Geoffrey had destroyed a colleague’s work in order to get promoted. Unhappy but unwilling to rock the boat, Marianne did her best to dismiss them. Eventually they went away, and she helped him celebrate his promotion with a fancy dinner at an exclusive restaurant in