• He just looks at her like she isn't there, like she she never was.
    "The things a person will do when they are both desperate and abandoned" she whispers almost crying " I sold my soul to escape the pain of being left behind." She just sat there alone with no hope of another trying to bear the pain she had been trying to escape from. She had nothing left, nothing to call home and no one to call home to. From there on she was forever a forgotten castaway with no soul for redemption.
    "You had a choice, and this is what you picked. The choice for no one to love you and for everyone to hate you. No matter how many kind and helpful deeds you do or will do it will never redeem you of this disgust you brought onto yourself." He stood over her in every way. His eyes were hard and judging on the girl who he once thought could be the picture of purity grace. How could he have ever be so foolish to even let this ,in his opinion, soulless, flawed thing into his life.
    "Tell me,what choice was I given? The choice of living everyday knowing that the only person I've trusted left me behind over a rumor a jealous widow told about me, because that only worked till you took her as a bride. I could have fled town in the cover of night, but you know as well as I do that would only disgrace my family. So again what choice did I have? So now you spit in my face by saying that I had a choice in any of this."
    "Ha! You talk as if you hadn't in the first place fled in the first place. And what's worse is where you ran to. Imagine my shock when one of my men broke the news to me that you had taken up with my cousin. My whore of a cousin for heaven sake."
    He still couldn't, for the life of him, figure out what pushed her to run to him. She could have just gone to her country home to hide, then none of this would have happened. As he stared into the amber colored scotch in front of him he couldn't get the question of why out of his head.
    "Like everyone else you want to know why? Why I did what I did?" Her words were quiet but it was enough to snap him out of his thoughts.
    "Yes, yes I would." For the first time since she had arrived face to face with him, he seemed calm and cool. Almost too calm. He didn't know what to expect with her. The trust between them was broken. The connection and the things that seemed to ease everything else when they were younger was gone. It was like they were strangers after years together. "But you can't, can you? Or you just don't want to."
    The idea of telling the story of what she had done since she fled scared her, more than anything. But why not, she had nothing stopping her. Everything and everyone she had once known was gone. The idea of reliving even some of the things she had done or even some of the things she fell into bed with could not only make her cringe, but a whole army.
    In all the fear of her past a thought occurred to her. She wouldn't be here unless he knew more than just where she was found. It occurred to her as well that even the slightest detail of her past would set hellfire on her trail. " Is there something you are not tell me?"
    For certain there was something that he was not willing to tell her. Just in the same way she did not want to explain her what had happen to her. His only thought to her question was that he was a foolish drunk when it happened, but also that he had hidden who he was when it happened.
    "Is there something you're not telling me?" She knew his mirrored question was the inquest. She also knew the inquest into the past was more than either one of them could handle.