Staring out of the window again, Bette Porter cut a lonely figure, solemn and vacant compared to the passionate vibrant woman she had been just last year. To her, last year seemed a lifetime ago. A distant memory of a life once lived.

A life that she had felt the need to escape after events rocked her to her very core. Still leaving her unable to step outside and engage the world again and so here she was staring at the world and watching it pass her by from the safety of her home. The fortress she had built to contain all that remained and protect her from a world she had come to fear.

A fortress built in a place that was not her native home but across the pond, severing ties and extricating her life from those of the people she held most dear. Unable to any longer force herself to be with them and tolerate the looks of pity and explain all over again how she had changed and how she needed different things from those that had at one time seemed so important. And so she had left with brief goodbyes and a long journey she found herself here, in a new home as she erected her walls in a country across the pacific. England felt so right to her, the first thing in a long time that had. It bought her a sense of peace in its greenery and seasons and tendency toward grey tempestuous weather. But under all of that a gentleness and serenity that soothed her damage soul. Lulled at first she had thought that to be healing but it wasn’t, instead merely a place where she could find some peace her soul still broken and in need of a miracle to recover. So as the days had turned to weeks and those weeks progressed to what now stood at ten months Bette had built her walls and retreated inside, literally and figuratively she hid from the world with no desire to reenter it any time soon. Her skills and talents and the wonders of the modern world allowing her retreat with ease, never forcing her to do anything other, day by day, than add bricks to the wall of the fortress she had built. The steps she found necessary to just keep going.