the opportunity and told him not only just how wrong he was in his assumptions but also that she had changed her mind and that she was no longer willing to have him as a lodger. Too late to wish her reactions had been faster now. He had gone.
The perfume of the roses wafted poignantly around her. She touched one of the buds tenderly. Poor boy, he must have been devastated when he lost his grandmother. She could well understand the emotions which must have led him to destroying her roses...the grief and frustration. He must have felt so alone, so deserted. It was so easy for her to understand how he must have felt. Too easy, she warned herself as she walked towards the house, reminding herself that it wasn’t the boy she was going to deal with but the man, and that that man had leapt to the most erroneous and unfair assumptions about her, based on the most tenuous of links and such scant knowledge of her.
Later, as she showered and prepared for her visit to her aunt, her conscience pricked her, reminding her that she needed only to have stopped Mitch Fletcher when he first mentioned her supposed lover and that she ought to have corrected him then. Why hadn’t she done so? Not because she was the kind of person who enjoyed allowing others to misjudge her so that she could wallow in self-pity and then enjoy their embarrassment once the truth was ultimately revealed. No, it wasn’t that. It was because...because she was afraid of discussing her aunt’s condition with anyone, afraid...afraid of what? Of what she might be forced to confront in doing so?
Her heart had started to hammer, the familiar feeling of panic, despair and anger flooding through her, the sense of outrage and helplessness... Abruptly she switched off, refusing to allow her thoughts to charge heedlessly down the road they were heading—down a road she could not allow them to go. Why? Because she knew that road led nowhere other than to an empty wasteland of anguish and pain. She had, after all, already travelled down it once when her parents died. Then there had been Aunt May to help her, to hold her, to comfort her. Now there was no one. No, she would be completely on her own...
She could feel the panic building up inside her, the rejection of what her mind was trying to tell her, the impotent rage and misery.
As she went downstairs she saw the roses she had cut, and for a moment she was tempted to pick them up and throw them into the dustbin. Then she remembered Mitch Fletcher’s flat and yet extraordinarily graphic description of his destruction of his grandmother’s rose bushes and she quelled the impulse.
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