Several calls later, her cell phone buzzed again this time it was the alarm. Bette closed the file on her desk and leaned back in her chair. Sadness engulfed her. She didn’t mean to hurt Felicity. Bette was clear from the beginning that she was not in it for the long haul. After every encounter when she was finally alone, the guilt, the tears and the remorse came.  Felicity at one point, early on said that Bette was emotionally unavailable, but Felicity was fine with that as she was a married woman. It was almost as if it was an experiment for her and Bette really didn’t care. Bette swallowed the last of the water from the glass on her desk holding the ice cubes in her mouth. The cold on her tongue did nothing to distract her thoughts. She still couldn’t figure out how Shane new.  When they sat talking on Shane’s birthday about Shane’s divorce, Bette finally said it out loud.  It had to be the Marijuana Bette had smoked otherwise she never would have disclosed the major fuck up she was currently living through. 

Bette turned her chair around giving her an unobstructed view of the city lights. From the moment she started the affair shame surrounded her. She knew it was wrong, but she didn’t care. She needed to stop it and she finally did, not by choice but by necessity. Bette pulled out the chain that was hanging under her blouse, a chain she never took off. At the end of the chain was her wedding ring and she sat twirling it while she thought. Bette recalled a saying by a French author ’The defects and the vaults of the mind are like wounds in the body. After all imaginable care has been taken to heal them, still there will be a scar left behind.”  The problem was, she had done nothing to heal from the divorce or the death of her sister kit and the hole in her heart continued to bleed.

********

The Next Day

Bette lay flat on her back, breathing hard as though she had been running. She had awoke from a vivid dream and put her hands over her face. She hadn’t slept much last night.  So much had happened over the last few weeks culminating in an unexpected reactive push that caused Felicity’s husband to fall backwards down the stairs at the front of Angie’s school.