[September]

[intheruins]

Even after having moved her belongings from her apartment in the city out into the countryside, Serena's house remains barren and desperately in need of decoration once having realized she had no furniture to her name. She hadn't minded too much what their house looked like in North Carolina – though of course, it was beautiful – but her priorities had been different then and she'd barely spent any time inside at all. Here, she has her son to think of, and she wants the place George is raised in to be warm.

So she's made an arrangement to go shopping with Edith, one of the few people in all of Darrow who might understand her sense of style – and why modern decor has her so at a loss. They decide on Törgt which is a store that she's never heard of – a fact that doesn't surprise her in the least. It's relatively inexpensive, though, and that's a selling point now that she's hardly wealthy.

George is sleeping in his pram as they wait by the entrance of the store for Edith, Serena turning through the pages of a catalogue and trying her best not to judge until she sees anything in person. Still, she can't help but think about what a waste of wood to lacquer it in such outrageous colors. There are scattered options that look like they might match what she has in the house already, but none of it has any soul to it and she can't help but gently sigh.

Comments

[ghostsarereal]

"We didn't, either," Edith says, shaking her head. "Not back in Buffalo, and certainly not once I'd moved to England." She'd been virtually in the middle of nowhere there, and while she knows that was more of a lucky convenience for the Sharpes rather than something deliberate, it had only made being there all the more unsettling. There was nowhere to go, no exit she could take. "Do you think the food is any good? It's hard to imagine buying a meal in a furniture store." It does seem rather convenient, at least, in the way that so many things about this time do, all designed to minimize the time spent on them. Its quality, though, may be a different matter entirely.

[intheruins]

"It's hard to imagine buying furniture in a restaurant, too," Serena muses. "But I'm confident that whatever they're serving up can't possibly be as bad as what this city seems to."

She's dealt with danger before, untrained horses and men with wandering hands and knives pointed her way, but at least she'd known what to do with those. In Darrow, it isn't so.

[ghostsarereal]

"Very little could be," Edith says, though as she does so, she's aware that it isn't entirely true. Inexplicable as some of the horrors she's seen in Darrow might be, none have yet to come close to what happened after her marriage to Thomas, how very nearly she'd come to being killed for it. In a strange way, though, there's something heartening about that. If she could survive that, then she thinks she can handle anything this place might have to throw at her. "So it has that going for it regardless."