“Go.” Lou watched Mia as she tried to gather herself and stood up, steadying herself against the table. She watched her walk out of the door and waited for a sense of relief to set in, for her own limbs to relax and a weight to drop off her shoulders, but none of that happened. Instead, she started shaking uncontrollably and burst into tears.

Chapter Eight

The one thought Mia couldn’t get out of her head was that the woman who had just decimated her, confronted her with all the wrongdoings of her youth, was really Louise Hamilton. Spindly Lou with the long arms and legs that always remained motionless whenever Mia unleashed one of her vile attacks on the girl. And they had been vile and vicious and as much a cry for help as any of the other things Mia got up to back then, but no help ever came.

She felt deeply ashamed, but more than that she felt flabbergasted, taken aback by the harshness of Lou’s words. A harshness she surely deserved, still now. Just as much as Mia turning up in the Pink Bean must have felt like Lou’s past coming back to haunt her, it felt like that to Mia now. A past she had long forgotten, even though snatches of it turned up unbidden in nightmares in the middle of the night when she woke up in a sweat and didn’t know what to do with herself because of the shame that engulfed her.

Was she still that narcissist Lou had described earlier? Was she still, underneath the veneer of good cheer and will, so cruel?

No, no, no. As she made her way to the bus stop, and realized she’d just missed one and had to wait twenty minutes for the next one, Mia told herself no. She was no longer any of these things, had perhaps never been them. Not that there were any excuses for how she had behaved, but she, too, had had to expel a few demons from her life to get where she was now. Or, put more accurately, her mother had to leave her father before life got any better for Mia.

Mia could kick herself for not recognizing Lou, but she looked so different. She had confidence now, not the brazen kind, but the subtle kind of confidence that comes from true self-acceptance. Not the overbearing kind Mia tried to display in her teens, when she was just as insecure as the next girl in her year. But she had inherited a brazenness from her father. The ‘gift’ to shoot down any critic before they could even open their mouth.

How could she ever make this up to Lou? And to think that before Lou had treated her so cold-heartedly last Friday she had entertained the notion of asking her out.