Much to her surprise Bette found her voice well enough to speak without having it shake audibly, "Take as much time as you need to take this in and process it Tina. I am definitely not in any position to complain or stop you. The last thing in the world I want right now is to…"

"Lose me. I know. Thank you for telling me Bette. Thank you for trusting me with this enough" Tina responded softly from the patio door.

" I’m going to go out and sit for a while" Tina realized she had spoken the words only as she was moving out the door and into the soothing comfort of the darkness of the garden. The world had taken on a surrealistic haze that she desperately wanted to escape. From the couch where the nightmare rendition of a long gone past had unfolded, Bette watched Tina leave. It was only after Tina had disappeared into gathering darkness that Bette realized she had been holding her breath.

Tina

Barely conscious of the act of walking Tina moved toward her favourite chair in the shelter of one of the ancient trees in the yard. Sitting down she slowly took several deep breaths and inhaled the soft, perfumed air. Crickets and cicadas performed their own unique music as Bette’s words finally found a more solid form in the swirling mass of disbelief and shock of T’s mind. So many things from their past made sense looks, reactions and Bette’s sometimes suffocating desire to control.

Bette’s words had seemed like a story, a fiction of staggering proportions. The idea of a Bette so very different from the one she had fallen in love with and had now refallen in love with was immediately rejected. Only when Bette’s words had finally faded and she had looked into the tormented eyes of her lover had the reality of the shadow woman’s life being anything other than fiction truly struck home. Tina fought desperately to grasp ahold of the erratic swinging of her emotions that seemed to bounce from one extreme to the other. One moment she was overwhelmed with a deep sense of sadness and failure that such a deep and significant part of Bette’s life had been closed to her through their entire 8 years together. Her inner voice seemed to bombard her mercilessly, How could you have lived with her so long and not known her at all? came the sting of her inner voice. The next minute Tina found herself repulsed at the thought of Bette placing herself in such a degrading position. It’s no wonder she never told you about this Kennard. If she had have with things being as they were you might very well have walked away from her. The unbidden images of the Bette that had been revealed to her formed and then evaporated like quick frames of an old black and white movie slightly out of focus.