Page 102 of Tears of Glass

“Sounds good.”

“You never mention your mum, Faith.” His eyes stare at me widely, pulling my past from within me like only he can.

“What’s to say? She left. She didn’t want to live her life in a tattoo shop and she didn’t want a daughter chasing around her heels.”

We stare at one another long and hard. Two children abandoned, still running from the pain.

“Anyway, I don’t want to hash over the past. Tell me what happened to the witness you lost. It’s a bit careless if you ask me.”

He doesn’t laugh at my lame joke. I don’t blame him.

“She doesn’t want to take the stand. She knows future employers will know about it.”

“So, she’s going to stay quiet?”

“Is she a witness to what happened to Melanie or to something that happened to herself.” I swallow hard, this is dancing too close to my own truth, but I force it down. I have nothing to hide from Eli, he knows everything, all the bad bits mixed in with the limited good.

“To Melanie’s case. We are back to nothing again and due in court in a couple of weeks.”

“That soon? It’s come around quick.”

He nods but I can sense a weight hanging behind his eyes.

“What?”

“I feel like I’m letting her down. I’ve been distracted, not at my best.”

My tongue dries. “Because of me.”

He shakes his head, his hand reaching for mine. “No, because of everything.”

“I’m sorry.”

I fork up some pasta and chew slowly to give myself some space. “If it happened to Melanie, it must have happened to someone else.”

My heart is crashing in my chest. I’ve thought about this over and over again the last few years. In the back of my head with every touch of the ink machine has been a small voice, barely heard asking, ‘who else is suffering?’

For a long time—until Eli—I couldn’t think of any pain other the one I contained. The pain was all mine.

“If there are, no one is coming forward.”

“But they might not know what happened to Melanie, maybe they’ve taken themselves as far away as possible.” My cheeks burn, and he watches me closely.

“You are worried Aiden has hurt someone else?”

I hate the way he says his name. I hate the fact there is a man between us I can’t get rid of.

“Sometimes I think about it. It’s hard. When my dad refused to believe me, I questioned it myself. Maybe I had asked for it. Maybe I had said yes.”

“But you didn’t.”

My breath catches. “No. I didn’t.” My brain whirls fast. “But I ran away. I left. I never saw what he did next.”

“You think someone might have left the firm who could be a witness to what goes on there?”

“I think it might be worth investigating.”

“And you’re an artist not a lawyer? I have teams working on this and no one has thought about it. We’ve been looking at the now, at Melanie and what she went through.”