Esmé didn’t answer her
phone, so Jason left her a message. She’s probly in a lecture, he
thought. He sent her a text message as
well. He wanted all his friends to be
together when he told them.
Esmé was old-fashioned
about using her smart-phone in lectures.
She turned it to silent when she was in one. So she only saw the message when she went to
get lunch in one of the uni cafés. She
had a prac until 5, but she could walk from the uni to Brunswick Street and get
to the café by 5.30. She texted back her
acceptance.
She wondered what he
wanted to tell her. He was special. She was in love with Keith but Jason was kind
and he had a lovely smile and he treated her as a real person. Keith and Jason and their friends might not be
perfect, but they were incomparably better than her father—and her mother,
too. But she thought more charitably of
her mother now. Even though she was
still angry at her mother for not protecting her when she’d been abused, she
understood intellectually, if not in her heart, how afraid her mother must have
been. She thought back to an article
she’d read in the newspaper, about battered women and how they often went back
to their husbands because they had no alternative, financially, or stayed with
them because they were afraid. The
article said that nearly a hundred women a year died in domestic violence. She could believe it.
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