In those days it was bean bags and blankets on the floor, posters on the walls and books everywhere. Their housekeeper at the time, Martha, had helped her to find various bits and pieces to make the space more comfortable, most of it from things her parents had discarded in the basement. Now though, there was a vivid pink velvet couch in front of the desk, usually adorned with a sleeping bulldog lying with his head propped up on the multitude of bright cushions. Clive had to be helped up and down, which was no easy feat, but he insisted on being by her side. This couch was where she sat to think about plot holes and character traits, her fingers lightly stroking his ears. The covers of all nine of her books hung in small frames on the walls. There were two low side tables at either end of the couch with old-fashioned, Tiffany-style lamps that helped to bring some light into the gloom.

Dominating the room and facing the fuchsia pink couch was her father’s old desk. A solid, heavy mahogany behemoth of a desk, with drawers down both sides, ostentatious gold handles and clawed feet. Hugh originally had his eye on it for his study, but Helen had insisted on moving it up here, which was an accomplishment in itself. It had to be dismantled and brought up in sections, but what made all the effort of rebuilding it in this small room worth it was knowing that she was writing her trashy novels on the desk that had brought her father such notable success in business. He would be spinning in his grave.

He certainly wouldn’t think writing was a suitable career for her. Helen would like to think she was shoving it in his face, accompanied by her middle finger.

She rocked gently in the chair, listening to it creak while she tapped her fingernails against the dark wood. Why had she told Sharon that?

That story wasn’t for telling. Not yet anyway.

But it also might be nice to get it out of her head, finally expose the nasty ugliness of it.

Her eyes scanned the boxes piled against the far wall. Most were full of her parents’ paperwork and bits from her childhood that had been relocated to the attic at her parents’ request when they cleared out her old bedroom in a rush to rid the house of her presence after she left hastily under a cloud of disgrace.

The shoebox wasn’t in there though. It contained the diaries, disguised beneath fake book covers. She scratched absent-mindedly at the old scar on her wrist, faint now when once it was an angry red.

No, Helen needed to come up with a new idea instead. That story was best left buried in the past where it belonged.

*