Chapter 1

One day, she was a mid-level sales associate, working for a large cosmetic company. Then, one afternoon, someone came around the office handing out envelopes.

Inside were three checks, and a letter. The letter informed all the employees that the whole department was getting laid off.

It also told that the first check was their final pay check, the second was for any vacation or sick pay they still had coming, and the third was a two month severance that the company had to give the workers upon being let go or laid off.

The sales personnel had until the end of the day to clear their things out of the offices. Linda didn't keep a lot of her personal stuff at the office as many did, but she had some things.

She felt bad for her clients that were expecting product or other information, so she spent about two hours calling her clients and letting them know about the delays that they would probably face, and that she was sorry not to be working with them anymore.

To her surprise, a few knew about the closure. They were sorry, too. A few others wanted her personal contact numbers, so that they could call her in the future, if a position opened in that client's company.

Linda did share her number and email address, but told the people she might like a little time off. If she couldn't stand it, then she would call them. It got some chuckles.

The next day Linda did a few errands, cashed her checks, and took herself to lunch and back home to watch a movie. The day after she decided to give the house she lived in a good cleaning. That, in itself, took three days to complete.

On the fifth day, she again took herself to lunch, dropped off the things she had marked for donation, then she did a bit of shopping. The next day, she just goofed off at the house, making calls and being online looking up stories and even signing up for unemployment.

It was on the seventh day, that Linda realized that she was out of things to do. With nothing to do, Linda's mind started to reflect on her life.

Linda had been a loner, growing up. As an adult, she was the same. She did have a few friends but she didn't do a lot of socializing.

She was forty-five, and she lived alone in a house that she inherited from her aunt and uncle when they had passed away. She didn't even have a cat. It was just her.

She had worked for the same company for over ten years before the layoff. She lived very comfortably on what she made from them. She had enough in savings at that moment, to get by for a few years. She knew she couldn't sit on her backside for that long, without going stir-crazy.

Linda started out life in a small town, where the main source of income was the lumber mill that both her parents worked for.

Her father was an ex-marine as well as a survivalist and loved the outdoors. Her mother loved her husband, the outdoors and her garden. From them, Linda learned everything one needed to know to live off the land by the time she was twelve years old.

She could shoot a bow as well as she could shoot a rifle. She could do anything needed to take care of a kill, including gutting, skinning and tanning the hide or pelt. She could make her own clothing if she wanted. Now, at forty-five, she only did sewing for special projects. She knew how to do any number of needlecrafts, and even knew how to spin yarn and weave cloth.

Then there came several things that really changed her life. The first, and most traumatic, was that her father was killed in an accident.

Well, it wasn't really an accident. One of the big machines started acting up but, before any one could even look at it, the thing exploded. This set up a chain reaction and when the fire was finally put out, her father and twenty-three others were dead. There was a big investigation that found the owner of the company had paid someone to sabotage the mill, so he could collect the very large insurance policy that he had on it. This meant that the mill was closed, permanently.

Linda's father was a man that had wanted to make sure his family was well taken care of, so had planned ahead. He had gotten a separate life insurance policy, even if it was through the company. That insurance paid out quickly, which gave her and her mother a little to live on.

Unfortunately, her mother never came out of her grief. Three months after her father died, her mother told her she was going to lie down because she was tired. That was how, at the age of fourteen, Linda became an orphan. The cause of her mother's death was a broken heart.