Anne had certainly been kept busy in the wake of the giant waves, when a great number of people had visited the IPD office to learn just what had occured and determine what was to be done about those persons had been temporarily displaced. But as dedicated as she was to her duty, she did not hesitate to abandon her post when she heard that Ariel ( Read more... )

Anne didn't expect the morning to bring anything special, no more than every morning was special when she got to wake up with Ariel beside her, but she turned out to be very, very wrong about that. The first thing she noticed was how warm she was, warm to the point of perspiration. She pushed the top quilt away and opened her eyes only to realise ( Read more... )

Anne had gotten over the novelty of the snow, but not her delight in it, when it finally came time to make their way to the ceremony. Billy and Kate -- well, mostly Kate, but Anne wouldn't have done it without Billy present -- had helped get her ready, which had mostly consisted of pinning her hair up and making sure her dress was buttoned, but for ( Read more... )

Sometimes Anne felt like she was out of tears. It was not true of course, and a few had escaped her over the past few days, but she did not weep and wail as she once would have; she felt only a great heaviness at Constable Fraser's absence. He had been very much someone she had looked up to, and would continue to do even now that he was gone ( Read more... )

There was a well-worn path now, winding from Anne's hut and across the main path through the Hamlet to Ariel's hut. The amount of time Anne spent traversing it, she thought maybe she ought to line it with stones or flowers or something pretty, but that thought always dashed from her head when she saw Ariel and her mind flitted to other things ( Read more... )

Anne discovered, after going swimming with Ariel -- though she'd suspected it long before -- that she really liked to walk barefoot on the beach, to feel the sand between her toes and the waves lap up over her ankles when she walked close to the ocean. She might not go swimming in her underthings where anyone else could see, but she could go ( Read more... )

Anne still hadn't fluffed up her bed to quite the way she liked it, but she could go out in the morning and gather some more leaves and grasses to stuff under her blankets; she didn't need to fix it right that moment. Perhaps she could even figure out how to build a real bedframe, though that was certainly not a priority. Still, the not-quite- ( Read more... )

Normally Anne's picnic basket held all her worldly belongings, ever since she'd fled her home ahead of the storm, but today she'd stowed all of those things beneath Ariel's bed so that she might use the basket for its intended purpose: a picnic. She'd needed to take a trip down to the small waterfall anyway, to determine whether Matthew's apple ( Read more... )

Anne found that wandering the halls of the compound didn't suit her, and she had no home to go to at the moment, so she decided to put herself to use back in the IPD office again. In the aftermath of the hurricane and all of the missing people, after all, there was plenty of work to be done and rarely enough people to do it. It didn't help her ( Read more... )

"Ariel!" called Anne, pushing her way past a thick, hanging vine. She felt like they'd been looking forever, but she was determined to keep going, for as long as she could. "Billy! Ariel ( Read more... )