Looking around the room at the happy family, Alannah felt once again that she did not belong here. Unnoticed by the others, and feeling very much unwanted and unloved, Alannah went outside to the back veranda in hopes to be alone. But sitting in one of the wicker backed chairs sat Santiago, looking out into the abyss and absently smoking a pipe.
Hearing the screen door open, Santiago looked back over his shoulder. "Come, join me, feeling any better?" he asked with an understanding smile
Instinctively warming up to him, Alannah sat down. "I'm sorry . . . I can't imagine what you must think of me. Some crazy girl with baggage from her past that she can't get rid of."
"What I think, mi amigo, is that you're unhappy. I also believe that you need a better life than the one you've had. I have known Dominic all my life, we grew up together on this island, and it is my strong opinion that having him in your life will cure you from whatever ails you. And that the sickness in your soul will eventually fade away."
"Sickness in my soul," Alannah muttered, surprised. "That is an interesting way to put it, but yes, that pretty much sums up my life."
Santiago smiled at that. "Oh, I'm sure that we could find much better words to describe you. Beautiful, spirited.."
This drew an unwilling smile from Alannah. "Yeah sure, but you forgot royal pain."
Santiago laughed at this, but then he said in a more sober tone, "You are still young, Alannah and you are still nothing more than a frightened girl. You have been forced to understand things about life than most girls . . . even most grown men . . . are sheltered from. That fact alone will make you stand out from the rest as a woman. It is not the woman's job to shelter a family it is a job handed down to us men by God. In a man's eye, there is always a bit of the child in a woman."
He smiled, kindly. "There is a great deal still the child in you yet, yet you are an unwilling child of war, thanks to your father's endless power battles. Alannah, children of war learn things early on in life that they should never have to learn. What you are facing now is the realization that life is fragile, and uncertain. You have also discovered the things that people are really and truly capable of. Not always good things, but not always bad either.
"You know, it is considered a truth that what you have witnessed amounts to a loss of innocence. There is a tendency for those people with loose tongues to gossip about the moral corruption that they assume they must follow.