Going Home

By Emma Lindhagen

Orryn ran away from home as a young teenager. After years spent trying to forget, she is forced to face the memories she’s been hiding from.
Thea never understood why her sister left. Her childhood was happy and she lives her adult life surrounded by people she loves, but she never stopped wondering.
When the two sisters meet again, a struggle to mend the bond they once shared, and reconcile their differing memories of their childhood, begins.

In a world where blending in is valued above everything else, scars can be a dangerous thing to show. After years of drifting and hiding, Orryn returns to her homeland and must choose between baring her scars and losing her sister a second time.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Emma Lindhagen
• Release date: Dec 21, 2014
• ISBN: 9789198223514

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Copyright © 2014 by Emma Lindhagen

Smashwords Edition

All rights reserved.

Cover photo by Sari Honkonen

Cover design by Amber Feldkamp on Fiverr.com

This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

This book is a work of fiction. Any similarities to real people, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.  All characters and events in this work are figments of the author’s imagination.

Visit my website at www.emmalindhagen.com

Going Home

By Emma Lindhagen

The Orryn Novellas #1

A story from the world of The Following

Thank you to my beta readers for all their valuable input, and to Sari and Kunal for being my sounding boards

This book is dedicated to Grace

For content notes/warnings, see the back matter of the book.

A wooden door creaked as it opened and then closed with a bang, waking Orryn. She glanced around the airplane cabin, wondering if anyone had seen her start. No one seemed to have noticed. She shifted in her seat and sighed. There were no wooden doors on the plane, but the one in her mind had just ended what she had hoped would be a transatlantic flight mostly spent sleeping. It took almost nine hours to get from the New York Governate International Airport to its London equivalent and they were only two hours into the flight. She doubted she’d get any more sleep. She rarely did after that dream, so instead of trying she pressed the call button on the panel above her head. A moment later a stewardess with light brown hair and a pretty face appeared.

What can I do for you, ma’am? the stewardess asked.

Bourbon. No ice, she replied.

Yes, ma’am. One moment. She turned and as she walked away Orryn noted that a pair of fantastic calves went along with the pretty face. It had been a while since she’d spent any intimate time with a pair of fantastic calves, or even a pair of mediocre calves. For a moment she considered testing the waters with the stewardess, but she quickly dismissed the idea. Airplanes were too public. You never knew what someone might see or hear, or what that person might do. Would they keep quiet, thinking it was none of their business? Would they shoot her a silent, sympathetic look? Or would the first thing they did once they got off of the plane be to report her? The posters from the Decency Office were everywhere, in the streets and the malls, in the schools and any other public space, even in the airport. The slogan rang out during the commercial breaks on every radio station and TV channel all across the world: react and report. And who knew what might make the other passengers react? It wasn’t worth the risk, regardless of the calves. When the stewardess returned Orryn reached into the breast pocket of her denim vest and fished out a wrinkled bill.

Thanks, she said when the glass was placed on the tray in front of her. Keep the change.

She took a first sip of the bourbon. An upside of travelling by plane was how accessible alcohol was. The shops around her little flat at home, which was now no longer her little flat, only sold cheap beer and vodka that tasted like fruit. Even if she went downtown to the bigger stores her yearly allowance of the stuff was low, a result of her spotty employment record. By this time of the year, early June, she had usually finished most of it. The rest of the year she bought her bourbon from a middle-aged accountant who had worked for the same company for twenty years and been sober even longer, and who supplemented his income by buying what his allowance afforded him and selling it on the black market. In the air, your allowance didn’t matter, only your money. Now that Orryn was going to the British Governate she would get a visitor’s allowance, slightly higher than what she was used to, but she could only stay for forty-five days as a visitor. If she stayed longer she would have to apply to have her residency reinstated, and with no employment opportunities on the horizon her allowance would then be next to nothing.

If she stayed… She wasn’t sure why she kept thinking that. When the digimail from Thea had arrived, her first instinct had been to decline the invitation. It was nearly a decade since she last set foot in her homeland. Apart from the formal communications from the British Governate announcing the death of first her mother and then her father, and her own exclusion from the latter’s will, she hadn’t had any contact with her family in seventeen years. She had no reason to change that now. She still wasn’t sure why, after nearly two weeks of hesitation, she had accepted the invitation and booked her ticket. When she had written to Thea to let her know when she was coming, she had received a reply so full of exclamation marks that for a moment she forgot that her baby sister was no longer a child but a grown woman. There had been no further communication between them since.

Orryn had sold her flat, not because she was planning on making her trip a permanent stay but because she needed the money and, she told herself, because she was tired of that apartment anyway and wanted a change. As the days went by and her departure date drew closer, the exclamation marks in Thea’s digimail began to make her nervous. What was behind all that enthusiasm? What did Thea expect from her? What was Thea like these days anyway? She had no idea.

I don’t think I’d even recognise her, she thought and finished her bourbon before pressing the call button to ask for a second one.

When Kella woke up she realised that she was alone in bed. The clock on the bedside table informed her it was 3:49 am. Yawning, she propped herself up on her elbows and looked around the room. Thea wasn’t there, but Kella