Blue had wished silently that her fiancé would scold her for the absence he would have assumed a hook-up, correctly at that. But he hadn’t seemed to notice. And she knew well she would know if he had. She sat patiently in bed with a book whose page she hadn’t turned a whole hour. Staring. Watching the words swirl as her eyes moved in and out of focus. But he came quietly. Shed his coat. Fixed a stiff kiss to her right cheek. Smiled the same way one would at their spanking new car sat in the garage for the first time. Went for his shower. She had feigned sleep when he re-emerged. And she was sure he masturbated quietly beside her. Sat at her mother’s dining table, it was quite easy to imagine her husband in the seat next to her. The earthy scent of damp hair and cologne making a gentle ingress on her self-control. His fingertips inching toward her own beneath the modesty of the dining table. The coolness of his wedding band brushing her k

Though the ignorant bliss would have been rather nice, Blue certainly wasn’t born yesterday. There was nothing particularly legal a corrupt senator paedophile could do with five million smackeroos, though life would have been a great deal easier if there was. Standing in front of the door she had pressed open with her palm how many times, she no longer felt worthy of even knocking. Her husband would be on the couch, she could imagine. In part due to the softly muttering television. Whether he was with another woman was beyond her. A soul so faultless and free of the clutches of greed that had marred him. Only she had become its claws. A baroness of corruption. A product of the greed which she had eluded thus far, though clearly unsuccessfully. She had become that which had ruined this man’s life—though not with the same intentions. Perhaps that was untrue. Had she traded her husband’s innocence for another? For her own? It was a bit

Blue had imagined her death time and time again. She’d hoped to be laying in a hospital bed, a metal dish under her arse to catch her shit and a pad of paper to write down her thoughts sat in her lap. Her grandchildren would sit around her and try their utmost not to laugh when she farted especially loudly. Her children would scold them when they did; “Gran’s old,” They would hiss. “Is this how you want to remember your last moments with her?” But she’d be staring blankly at the roof. Vincent would be twenty years dead by then. Her only thoughts would be of hoping they’d meet in whatever darkness was awaiting her. That after the turmoil that had been her young adult life, death was sleep after a very long, very hard day. The scenario that she’d be ushered into her sperm-donors house by her fiancé with a gun in her back hadn’t existed in even her wildest fantasies. Fantasy was perhaps an

“It’s not that simple,” Michael paused, staring at his daughter. She looked like she hadn’t slept in days. “From what I’ve gathered Richard destroyed the evidence my wife,” He glanced to the woman bitterly. It was a wonder they were still together. “Sold to him,” “So that’s it?” “No, I’m sure there’s something somewhere—Christopher isn’t half as smart as he thinks he is,” He glanced at the teenager who looked about as confused as he would have thought. “Richard and Vincent were friends all throughout school, there’s a point where it all went digital and that would have had to be when they both seemed old enough to do it themselves,” she looked even more confused. “He can’t be framing children, Blue, why would a five-year-old commit fraud?” “If the

Vincent hadn’t said a word to her in a while. They had driven in silence. She had sat at the kitchen counter. Watched as he made her a green tea, eyes refusing her own. Admittedly, she felt rather nervous. Was her disappointed in her? A possibility she had only just considered. But he hadn’t even given her the time to explain. She knew that he was a grown man. Wondered if he wouldn’t care for the antics that had cleared his name simply because she’d caused a bit of a fuss with it all. And grown men didn’t like fusses. No, they’d much rather the quiet. And Blue, as it turned out, was certainly not quiet. Blue was guilty of assaulting a police officer, as it turned out. Something Vincent had paid the officer generously to forget. No, he was far more concerned with the fact she’d been printed in his morning newspaper proclaiming her guilt to protect her beloved fiancé—and the fact when he&rsqu