Tina had burst into tears as soon as she was behind the locked door of her tree house.  She pulled her sleeping bag – a nice thick heavy duty one that she had bought herself a few years ago – out onto the deck along with two pillows and lay down looking up at the trees and the sky and off in the distance to the blue-gray mountains.  There in the darkness, she sobbed.

Her mind was racing, trying to understand how she had come to this point.  There was so much anger and bitterness mixed in with her longing and regret that she couldn’t piece things out, make sense of them.  What had happened to Bette Porter?  She was nothing like the girl she remembered.  And why had she stopped writing and forgotten her?  What had Tina done to elicit the rejection? 

As she curled into a fetal position she wept more and let her mind and body reel with her pain.  She could so use a drink, she was thinking, anything to numb her thoughts and anesthetize the ache in her heart.  But mercifully exhaustion caught up with her and she began to drift to sleep still picturing Bette, the older Bette, in her mind, while flashes of how she had once known the girl six years ago taunted her with what was, what might have been.

The next morning Tina woke at dawn when the sunlight peeked into the little window.  She went to the house and started the coffee pot then quietly went upstairs to shower.  When she went past the second bedroom, she could see through the partially open door that Bette was sleeping in a huddle, holding a pillow close to her.  For a moment she paused in the doorway and watched the brunette. 

Tina was being tugged back and forth, a tug-of-war inside her heart and mind.  Part of her wanted to tiptoe in and crawl into bed with Bette and hold her and tell her how sorry she was for the things she had screamed at her last night on the lawn.  But the other part of her wanted to shake the young woman awake and scream at her some more, to demand answers and explanations. When Bette sighed in her sleep and rolled over, Tina left and went to shower.