A Girl can but Dream

Change is an inexorable factor in everyone’s life, of which no one is exempt. For some people, change is a hideous reality that is suffered and sometimes denied. More than often, change is perceived as negative, brought about by external pressures, bad decisions, illness or even bereavement. For others, change means freedom to be the person they always knew they should have been. To shake off the past may be cathartic, but is usually very difficult to do. People are often their own worst enemies, by hanging onto stuff that they should happily discard.

Two people, separated by thousands of miles and two different cultures, find themselves drawn towards each other. Neither has any knowledge of the other, for if they had, they might never feel as they do.

One is suffering from the cruel pain of separation, as his wife died of cancer almost a year previously. John Collingwood is a veteran police officer of more than thirty years. He is the Chief of Police of a sleepy Arizona township, but finds solace to his grief in the bottom of a bottle and by focussing on his work, to the detriment of his health and his grown-up daughters. His brother persuades him to take an overdue vacation, joining him in a trip to England in search of the history of their family.

While in leafy Dorset, he meets a woman who is different to all those women that his well-meaning sister keeps pushing his way in the hope of getting him to rejoin the human race.

Articulate, intelligent, independent, attractive and only a couple of years his junior, John feels more than a small attraction for Deborah Cartwright. He discovers that cancer also has claimed her spouse relatively recently, so they have that in common. She also has grown-up children; two boys and a daughter. That daughter has recently delivered Dee’s first grandchild, a fact John finds hard to believe, as she looks too youthful. Finally in the company of someone who not only understands his grief, but also can facilitate the release of months of pent-up emotion, John falls in love with the compassionate Dee.

Desperate for that love, Dee is torn between at last finding the man of her dreams and telling that man the hard truth of her past.

For Dee was not born a woman. Dee’s spouse had been called Delia, and as David, Dee had transitioned after Delia’s death, having carried the burden of knowing that he should have been born female all his life.

Should she tell John?

Could she afford not to?

If she does, what will he do?