Gemotions

The scent of lavender, which she usually found calming, did nothing to soothe Sarah. She'd found the album tucked away in the back of a drawer, a trove of pictures of her great-aunt Eleanor. The narrative she knew of the spinster aunt, a pious woman who devoted her life to the church, felt like a deliberate fiction.

One particular photograph lingered in her mind. It showed a young Eleanor, vibrant and alive, dancing with a man beneath a canopy of stars. Her face, usually so composed in the few portraits Sarah had seen, was lit with a joy that seemed forbidden. A deep, unsettling ache resonated in her.

The familiar rhythm of her day felt disrupted, as if a rogue wave had crashed against the shore of her carefully curated existence. She felt the urge to phone her mother but hesitated, suddenly uncertain if she even knew the woman she was calling.