After years of struggling and fighting, Elena Parker had thought she’d finally earned her happy ending. She had a career she enjoyed, a husband and children she loved, and everything was going the way she’d hoped it would. She was growing old and grey, and getting to live her life just the way she was meant to. She should have known it would all come crashing down on her sooner or later, and, sure enough, her entire life had been turned upside down in the span of a single night, and she’d found herself struggling to cope with it all. Her husband didn’t remember marrying her, their children, or anything else from the past thirty years. It’d been a hard blow to take, and to find out that he wasn’t the only one didn’t make it any easier. What was even harder was seeing her husband fall in love with someone else, her best friend no less, but she was helpless to stop it. She wanted him to love her, she wanted him to come home and for their life to pick up just where they’d left off, but it became obviously clear that that wasn’t going to happen, and it was selfish of her to expect him to feel the same way she did, so she did the only thing she thought she could do, and she gave him space.
As hard as it had been for her, she knew things hadn’t been easy on the man she’d married either. Giving him space had been working well, it gave her some time to think and process what was happening, and it’d made the pill slightly easier to swallow. Sleeping alone didn’t get any easier though, and more nights than not she found herself tossing and turning until she finally found a restless sleep. He seemed happy though, and her kids were okay, and honestly, at the time, that had been enough for her. That was, until the costume party. Her husband and best friend had disappeared, and the rumors had flown freely throughout Mystic Falls. They’d run off to elope, they were finding a way to make the spell permanent, all sorts of things, and it’d be a lie if the doppelganger said it hadn’t gotten to her. Then they’d shown up a month later just as suddenly as they’d disappeared, and it became more than apparent that they hadn’t run off for a trip of leisure or love, but they had in fact endured something far more sinister. Once again, at a loss for what to do, she’d given them space, and given them time to adjust and heal. She gave them as much time as she could before she found herself on their doorstep after work, stethoscope still wrapped around her neck as her mind was elsewhere when she knocked on the door. When the door opened, she didn’t even process who had answered before she found herself speaking.
“We don’t have to talk if you don’t want to.” She wanted to talk though. She missed her husband. She missed her best friend, and she wanted this nightmare to be over, for everything to be okay again. “I just wanted to see how you guys were holding up.”
