♠. always a lady.

Summer Festival turned out to not be quite as great as he first thought. Maybe strawberry picking with Alex and talking about tarts, even baking in a hotel kitchen had been good but the rest of it had been the descent into hell. He’d never liked the idea of beauty pageants but he hadn’t know they could get so bad. He should have expected people didn’t pull any punches around here but for some reason even he struggled to relate his Father who had always been obsessed with his work with having an affair with a woman so young who he’d literally seen grow up. It made him feel so sick that he pushed the thoughts as far away as possible. It was what he liked to do with things, put them into neat compartments and lock them away so he never had to hurt about it again. He sat in Ritzies, they were hosting a small event that afternoon with performances and he held a guitar he had rented in his hands. He wasn’t the most musical but he played sometimes, maybe relearning for a short time would be able to take his mind off of it. He was halfway through watching a video about an animal rescue in Australia when the other person approached.

A huff of air blew past red painted lips as the lady ran the pad of her finger across the rim of her glass. So far being back in Vertmoor had done nothing but remind her of all the reasons she was so eager to leave it all in her rear-view mirror. Even the Beauty Pageant at the Summer Festival, the one even she was actually counting on had been a mess of epic proportions, ending with news that she could have lived her whole life without knowing. She shuddered just thinking of Vidal having a being with a woman so young, let alone leaving a child behind in the wake of his death as proof of the affair.