+After leaving the pack house he still had to go shopping for Thanksgiving.  This late in the week he was positive that most of the stores would be picked clean so he went to B& B first and raided the walk-ins before heading to the grocery store to pick up some smaller essentials.  There was just too much scattered energy in him after the Alex/Xavier run in to simply go home and try to go to sleep.  It felt better to be doing something useful.  Besides which, after months of everyone being overly busy it would be nice to have the family together for the holiday.+

+As he carried the groceries inside he alternated the phone between his hand and his shoulder and made calls to people to invite them over to the house on Thursday for Thanksgviing dinner.  If they were going to make enough food to feed an army then they might as well invite an army over to enjoy it.  Calls were placed to wolves, tigers, rats, and his own staff.  Some people had plans with family of course, but he invited them anyway.+

+It took awhile to go through his phone book, but that gave him time to put the groceries away and start prepping for the cooking that he would need to start on in the morning.  Some things he could take care of tonight, but the majority of the cooking would need to be done at the final hour so it would be fresh.  Once he was finished in the kitchen he bounded upstairs to see if Jenna had already come home for the evening, but when he opened the bedroom door the room was empty and quiet.+

+Something about that stillness sent a chill up his back and he paused in the doorway watching the way the curtains were being blown inward by the breeze.  Someone had left the window opened to cool the attic room and he moved towards it to pull it down when he saw something strange sitting on his desk and stopped in his tracks.  The only light in the room was the silvery glow of moonlight from the window, but it was enough to see the small box on the desk holding down a sheaf of paper whose edges fluttered from the breeze coming in.+

+As he moved towards the desk he felt like he was moving in slow motion, and part of him didn't really want to see what the letter said.  Anytime someone left a note in your room instead of talking to you it never seemed to end well.  Callous hardened fingers slipped over the paper and tugged it out from underneath the tiny box.  His thick lower lip caught between his teeth for a moment as he held the letter up and began to read the familiar hand writing on the page.+

My Darling,

This is a difficult letter for me to write because it is not one that is filled with anger or accusations.  Those are easy to write because then you can hide your true feelings behind those strong emotions and feel justified.  That also fly off my fingertips in feigned righteous indignation.  This is also nothing about love, either whether we love, or how deep we love, because we know that we do. 

+ Reading the letter he had to take a few steps back and let his body fall down onto the bed because he was afraid for the moment that if he didn't he would simply fall to the floor.  Somewhere in his chest he fell a dull aching start around his chest and it felt like his air flow was cut off for a moment.  The letter went on to talk about yellow tigers, the endangered and hunted last of their kind, that needed the aid of a Queen.   She felt called to help them, as though it was a purpose given to her from God.   The weight on his chest increased and for a moment as he read the last part of the letter all he could do was stare blankly at the page in his hand. +

I miss you and will continue to miss you, but I realize that this is something I must do.  Please pray about this and try to understand from my side of things.  I wish all of you good things.  Most of all I wish you all the best of things, my darling man.

                                                                                                   Love  Forever,

                                                                                                                     Jenna

+At some point he laid back in the bed and tried to let the world slow down for a moment while his brain tried to come to terms with how much his entire life had just changed.  For the next few hours several things happened: he tried to call her cell phone and found that it had been disconnected, he tried looked for her at her home but she was gone, and he tracked her scent to the airport where it faded.+

+By the time the sun began to crest the horizon he was sitting on the hood of his car watching the sun rise as the planes at Louis Armstrong International Airport took off and landed with people shuffling along from one place to another.   Tears blurred his vision and he wiped them away with the back of his hand as a shuddering breath heaved from his lungs.  She was gone.  And she had known him well enough to know that had she spoken to him he would have tried to change her mind.+

+He couldn't blame her for the way she'd done it because he understood, or thought he understood, why she was doing this.  Unfortunately that didn't make the pain any less, or the idea of going on without her any harder.  Not for a moment did he doubt her love, and he loved her more for the thing that she was going to do.  Her devotion to the cause of her people made him proud and made her even more the woman he had fallen in love with, but that didn't make losing her any less of a blow.+

+The letter was carefully folded in the back pocket of his jeans and he could feel it there like a weight.  When the sun had fully risen he knew that he had to go.  There was family coming home, food to be cooked, things to be taken care of, and Jenna's tigers needed to be told.  Geller knew that Jenna wouldn't want him sitting in a parking lot all day hoping that she would come back, she would want him to take care of things here.  But though he went through the motions of life his heart and soul were in another place, they were a million miles away, set free to fly with the woman who had captured them and made them her own.+