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to slow her beautiful car and began the tedious task of leaving the glorious open countryside behind and instead navigating the increasingly frustrating, suffocating banality that was the twenty-first century urban environment. Finally, she pulled into one of her favourite waiting spots, not far from where he lived, and turned off the purring engine. Her heart was now beating so fast that she could hear it pounding in her ears. How soon before he came by and she could watch him approach? As she waited with the patience of a spider in the car, with the people passing by still casting admiring and envious glances at the Jaguar as they did so, she thought how funny life could be sometimes. When she’d been younger and far more foolish than today, she’d been so in love with Michael that she thought it might kill her. But in the end, he’d let her down, leaving her broken-hearted and bewildered. Why had he abandoned her? Why hadn’t her love been enough? How many weeks after he’d broken up with her did she torment herself with such questions? How long had she watched him, trailing after him in her less-conspicuous car, wanting and willing him to relent and take her back? Looking back on herself at that point in time, she could feel only pity and perhaps a little scorn for her old self. But she could forgive herself too. She’d been desperately, crazily, whole-heartedly in love with him, and love made fools of everyone, didn’t it? Odd to think, now, that if she hadn’t met Michael, she’d never have met the man who was destined to be her real love, her one true soulmate. Even more astonishing to realize that, when she’d first met him, she hadn’t been able to stand him! Mia shook her head now in remembrance of her own folly. To think, in the beginning, she’d been
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