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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Scorpienne" data-source="post: 444687" data-attributes="member: 67264">Over 20 years ago, I wrote a story on the old Soapchat board entitled Secret Lovers.  It was the prequel to another story, The Broken Road.  I didn’t save much of either of them so most was lost when Soapchat crashed in 2016.Flash-forward, I started watching the series again recently and decided I'd like to revisit the old Secret Lovers story.   This take will be a little different, but I hope it will have the same heart as the original. Couple of things, I did take some liberties with it in that, in my story April is still alive.  JR and Bobby still run Ewing Oil (I didn’t like the cartoonish way of the final couple of seasons so I hope that’s okay).Anyway, here is the prologue and Chapter 1.PrologueSue Ellen didn’t bother to tell Don she was leaving him.  He was away on a shoot in Prague when she made the decision.  He had promised he would be back in six weeks.  So, she waited. Six weeks came and went.  Excuses.  Logistical issues were going to delay things for a few more weeks, he’d said.  He promised a lengthy holiday if she could just wait a while longer. Waiting.  It had been a repetitive cycle.  Arranging her life around a man.  Waiting for JR.  Waiting for Don.  Even Dusty to a certain extent.  So much of her life wasted – waiting.  Her mind was made up.  Made up before she dropped the phone back to the receiver.  It was over.  Immediately. She supposed the proper thing would have been to wait for his return and tell him then, in person.  She could dawdle about, wiling away the time until he decided to return to London once more.  But there was no good reason to and on occasion, she didn’t think of herself as very proper anyway.She contemplated her next steps.  It occurred to her she had always referred to the grand city as London.  But she was unable to come up with a single instance she had ever referred to the city as home. Home was so far away.  Nearly 5,000 miles but it seemed to her it may as well have been on another planet.  She missed it.    She longed for sounds of crickets and cicadas in the evenings as the sun dropped below the horizon.  The intense heat of the Texas sun.  She thought of the ambient sky and how, when she was a little girl, she truly believed if her arms were just a tiny bit longer, she could have reached out her bedroom window to touch it.  She missed John Ross who had moved back to Southfork two years ago.  Not that she blamed him.  He wanted to be back with the friends he’d grown up with, his school and extracurricular activities – his father.  Sure, there were visits.  Lots of phone calls.  But it wasn’t the same and she felt terribly guilty.  Now he was a teenager.  And time was getting away from her. She would leave tomorrow.  It would be an expedited, clean break. She quietly made her way to the master suite and picked up the bedside telephone to ring up her travel agent. “Penny, this is Sue Ellen,” she began.Penny replied.  “Good morning, Mrs. Lockwood.  What can I do for you today?”“I’d like you to procure for me a first-class ticket to Dallas, Texas.”“I can certainly take care of that for you.  What are your travel dates?”“I’d like my departure to be tomorrow.  The earliest flight possible.” “That might be a little tricky, but I’ll see what I can do.  And the date for your return flight?”“There is no return date.  It’s one-way.”</blockquote>

Verification: What month follows July?