title: Love Forever After
author: Kraemer, Therese A.
description: In the year 1896, Brett Hope Bouvier, a young, distraught woman, in total confusion from medication, commits suicide because she thinks her husband, Jacques, is having an affair. Jacques hides the truth of her suicide and is convicted of her murder and hanged. In 2013, Elaine Dale Bouvier receives a phone call from a lawyer informing her that her spinster aunt died leaving her the sole beneficiary of her estate. Lawyer Robert Michael, executing the will becomes immediately attracted to Elaine and Elaine find an instant attraction to him also. She has her first bout of deja-vu, feeling as if she has meet Robert before. Completely confused by her overpowering magnetism, he offers to drive Elaine to Virginia. They marry before they go south to live in Elaine’s new estate, . A few months later they have a real wedding and Robert presents her with an antique ring with the inscription, Love Forever After. And then their happiness turns to a horror story. Elaine begins to have more episodes of deja-veu, sees ghosts, and becomes claustrophobic. When her friend Zoë visits, Elaine believes that Robert is being unfaithful with her. Fearing the worst, she flees down the stairs, but trips and falls. She wakes up in 1896 in a dark and dingy cell. As the mental fog begins to ebb, and as new thoughts become clear, old memories begins to vanish. She’s no longer Elaine, but Jacques Bouvier. Resting his tired body against the cold, damp, brick wall, Jacques thinks back and relives, in his mind, the day he first met Brett Hope Sullivan. Regaining consciousness, Elaine awakens from a terrible nightmare. She tells Robert of her strange dream; how she’d lived the life as Jacques. She also explains to her husband, that he lived the life of Brett. She discovered the truth that Jacques was no more unfaithful to his wife than Robert was to her. Elaine realizes she almost made the same horrible mistake Brett made and that her own life had repeated those same patterns of mistrust.