Meeting Neal Frazier had reawakened some part of her that had been dormant for a long, long time. For most of her life, she had felt like an outsider, merely an observer as things happened to other people, while she went about her own unvarying routine. Nothing ever seemed to touch her personally. Don’t get involved. Stay clear. Stay safe. It had been the creed she’d lived by. Her early years, passing from one family to the next, had taught her that to love someone meant to be hurt, sooner or later. Now, for the first time in her life, she was willing to allow herself to be vulnerable. It seemed that Neal possessed some magical key that might release her from her self-imposed prison of loneliness. Somehow she knew that their meeting today could make all the difference in her life, if she let it. Getting off the bus, she walked the short distance to her apartment, just east of downtown Winchester. Nearby stood Stonewall Cemetery, where several thousand Confederate and Union soldiers lay buried.
