The Affair. Amanda Brooke

       1

       The Accusations

       Monday, 22 February 2016

      Nina sat alone at the breakfast bar as the sun began its slow ascent over the quiet Cheshire town of Sedgefield. The watery light had an ominous red tinge as it crept into the darkened kitchen of the pretty townhouse she shared with her husband and two teenage children. By rights, she should be unloading stock at the shop by now after an early morning trip to the flower market, but Nina was still in her dressing gown, her blonde hair pulled back in a butterfly clip, her face unwashed and her blue eyes dull and empty.

      Nina had inherited a strong work ethic from her father, along with the family floristry business, and it had been going against everything he had taught her when she phoned her assistant Janet to say she wouldn’t be in. There were a handful of orders that Janet would do her best to complete from the slim pickings what would be left at the market by the time she got there, but Nina had told her not to worry and to turn down new business if she needed to. In truth, Nina didn’t care, and she had no idea when that situation might change. She wondered what her parents would make of the sorry mess she was in. She was almost glad they weren’t around to see it.

      Ever since Scarlett had dropped her bombshell on Saturday night, Nina had been in a state of shock, and more than twenty-four hours later, she was still struggling to work out how she was meant to react. It didn’t help of course that Scarlett had barricaded herself in her bedroom. Nina had tried to reason with her, she had spoken gently to coax the truth out of her daughter, and when that had failed, she had yelled and made threats, only to be met with equal success.

      With nothing except the most meagre of information to go on, Nina had no option but to sift through the minutiae of her life and question everything she had thought to be true. The returning answers were ones she didn’t want to hear, but she couldn’t ignore them, not any more, not when her fifteen-year-old daughter was pregnant.

      And of all the questions she had, there was one that scared Nina most. Who the hell was the baby’s father?