We Who Are Jaded

Chapter Fifteen

My stomach tightened, my breathing stopped and my heart clenched.

This was heart attack, I was having a heart attack.

Pull yourself together Evans.

I swallowed, ordering myself to breath and compose myself.

"Thank you for the cake but if you'll excuse me." I hopped down from the counter and stole out of the room before I could undignified myself futher by crying. I could hear the mutterings of Barbara even after I'd closed the door behind me. She would gossip of this, I had no doubt about that. I would be the foolish little girl her master ran around chasing the skirt of with without even telling her he fathered a daughter.

A daughter.

I slumped against the passage and pulled my phone from my back pocket. My fingers shook as I scrolled down the list of my contacts, wanting to have it out with Kieran now.

I was not to be made fun of, humiliated, betrayed.

Yet, when I got to his name I couldn't do it. No matter how much I willed myself to push the green button, I couldn't. I clamped my phone shut and stuffed it into my pocket.

Then I fled.

I ran through the door, across the hallway and out of the front door. Beyond that there was only garden and gravel. Looking around, I spotted a gate leading to what I hoped was a back garden. Desperately I dashed into the gate, yanking it open and going through it.

No thought of clarity entered my mind as I searched for refuge.

In the valley of the sloping lawns and dressing the distant hill there was a cluster of trees, not big enough to call a forest but dense enough to hide in. Tears streamed down my face and hair was clinging to the tracks they left behind. I turned to check no one was watching me from the back windows; I didn't want to be found. Seeing there was no one I scrambled down the lawn and straight into the trees, not looking back.

Inside the trees it was light, the ground shattered by the shadows and sunlight breaking between the leaves. The sound of a bird singing filled the narrow weaving pathways. The whispers of flowing water called to me, beckoning I come and sit for a while and embrace its tranquillity.

My surroundings were all too fairytale and lovely far from what I thought Kieran's life was, the life I could've wanted. But I couldn't haver been in that house, not while I tried to hold myself together. I would have destroyed everything to repress my rage.

Stumbling through a copse of bushes, the burn I heard appeared before me. I was narrow but deep enough, if I had taken the fancy, for paddling in. I knelt beside it and cupped the cool water in my hands.

I needed to think, I needed clarity.

"Daughter? A bloody, bloddy daughter," I choked, my damp hands clawing at my face. How could he not tell me of something as significant as that? I knew he was old and had dabbled about with women a bit but never had I expected him to have flesh and blood stowed away in a dark manner house.

Always the stuff of novels, aren't you Indigo Boy?

Kieran and I hadn't been going out for that long and I knew that but surely I deserved the right to know something as big as the fact he had a daughter chasing his shadow. Had he told me I might have been angry, jealous even, but I would never have left him or hated him for it.

Wouldn't I?

Sense remained me that Kieran was doomed to eternity and to expect him to be celibate and careful was unreasonable. This was the twenty first century, wasn't it?