She watched Chantelle clamber onto Daniel’s back, the angel clutched tightly in her hands so she wouldn’t drop it. Then slowly, one step at a time, Daniel carried her to the top. Together they stretched out and Chantelle popped the decoration onto the tall tip of the tree.
The second the angel sat atop the tree, Emily had a sudden flashback. It came on so quickly she began to breathe rapidly, panicked by the abrupt shift from her bright, warm inn to the colder, darker one of thirty years prior.
Emily was looking up at Charlotte as she placed the angel they’d spent all day making onto the tree. Her dad was holding Charlotte aloft, who at this point in time was a chubby toddler, and he wobbled slightly from the numerous sherries he’d drunk that day. Emily remembered a sudden, overwhelming emotion of fear. Fear that her tipsy father would drop Charlotte onto the hard hearth. Emily was five years old and it was the first time she’d really understood the concept of death.
Emily returned to the present day with a gasp to find her hand pressed against the wall as she steadied herself. She was hyperventilating and Daniel was there beside her, his hand on her back.
“Emily?” he asked with concern. “What happened? Another memory?”
She nodded, finding herself unable to speak. The memory had been so vivid and so terrifying, despite her knowledge that no harm had befallen Charlotte that winter evening. She cherished most of her recovered memories but that one had felt sinister, ominous, like a sign of the dark things to come.
Daniel continued rubbing Emily’s back as she made a concerted effort to slow her breathing back to normal. Chantelle looked up at her, worried, and it was the child’s face that finally brought Emily out of the grips of her memories.
“I’m sorry, it’s fine,” she said, feeling a little embarrassed to have worried everyone so much.
She looked up at the angel, at the sequined dress she wore. It had taken her and Charlotte hours to glue all those individual sequins onto the fabric. Now, with the ebbing firelight coming from the living room, they sparkled like rainbows. Emily thought it almost looked as though they were winking at her. Not for the first time, she felt Charlotte’s presence close by, communicating love, peace, and forgiveness. Emily tried to hold onto the feeling of her spirit, to take comfort from it.