it. He watched her as she carried boxes, helped organize each booth for the sale, and brought plates of food to everyone after having taken it upon herself to order and pay, though no one realized she had, for the pizza. She appeared tireless. After five hours of helping three churches put together a large fundraising craft fair/bake sale, Serenity still had a smile on her face. She was asked the same question by every elderly lady with purple hair in the county, and with each one she patted their arm, smiled warmly, and answered with just as much patience as she had the very first time. Dair was just waiting for the moment when she finally threw her hands in the air and said to hell with it, the way most would have. But as he watched her get into her car waving at the pastor’s wife and telling her she would be back at 6:00 a.m. to help tomorrow, he realized that Serenity was not most people. She was something else and he wanted to know more. Not just because she was his next assignment but because she was different and he wanted to know why.
The next day, she did just as she said she would. She was the first one at the building to help with the fundraiser. After lunch she told a lady named Pearl, apparently the person in charge of the entire event, that she needed to leave. She apologized profusely and then explained that she had volunteered to help her aunt decorate the library for Christmas, to get the Angel tree organized, and to wrap the gift boxes for the presents they were sending overseas to the soldiers still stationed there.
“I truly am sorry, Mrs. Pearl,” Serenity said sweetly. “I didn’t realize I had overbooked myself.”
“You go on, honey,” Pearl waved her off. “You’ve done more than enough. I think we can handle it from here. Thank you for everything.”
“It wasn’t a problem. I’m glad I could help.”
Dair had watched as she decorated the library, made posters for the canned food drive and Angel tree, and then wrapped twenty small boxes that people could take and fill with things to send the soldiers. The entire time she talked happily with her aunt, Darla, who might be the only person as angelic as Serenity. They sang Christmas hymns and told stories of memories from the previous year’s Angel tree event. Not once did she complain that her feet hurt, or that she was tired, or that she had had to smile so much in the past two days that she was sure her face would split in half. Her kindness was contagious, Dair noticed, because people smiled when they saw her coming. They went out of their way to wave at her or stop and talk to her, and he could tell that they genuinely liked Serenity.
He could have finished this job days ago, but he continued to observe her daily life for a week. The only time that Serenity ever allowed her weariness, worries, or any emotion other than care and kindness, to show was in the privacy of her room and only to her cat, Mr. Whitherby. It was in those times when the house was quiet and still that she would pour out her heart to her faithful, but cantankerous, feline sounding board. It was also during those times that Dair truly got to know and begin to understand Serenity Tillman.
He had been weaving the dream every night for the past four nights, while silently watching her during the day. And still after four days he had yet to get the entirety of the dream into her mind. It was on that particular night that he felt the burden of his position for the first time in a very, very long time. He listened to her talking to Mr. Whitherby, and his soul shrank at the frustration and hint of fear he heard there.
“I’ve never been afraid to go to sleep before, Mr. Whitherby,” she told the large cat that lay in her lap flicking his tail as he purred under her attentive petting. Her hands stroked down his back over and over in a methodical rhythm. “It’s not necessarily that the dream is scary. It’s just that it is not what is supposed to happen; it’s not what I want for my life. I feel so selfish for wanting out, especially when I’ve allowed others in this town to rely on