Thursday 24 August 2017

I only turned away for a moment.......

I only turned away for a moment.......  was a prompt offered at a recent writers group meeting.  As usual, it evoked quite different responses from the individuals present.  You can see another one here - Musings from the Mountains




I only turned away for a moment, to check that all the guests were happy, their glasses full, and that the buffet held no empty trays.  Even as I turned back to answer Evelyn's latest witty remark with a light hearted bon mot of my own, I felt the ripples of silence race across the function room.

Evelyn's face was before me, but no longer the centre point of my vision.  Evelyn's waiting smile faltered and her gaze flickered from side to side as she began to register the change in the conversational tone.  The mood had gone from exuberant to expectant in the blink of an eye.

I tried to smooth my own expression but it was too late.  She had noticed that my own focus was no longer on her gorgeous face, but had shifted onto a line that passed just over her left shoulder.  For a second or two she looked annoyed, then a brief look of confusion preceded one of open-mouthed shock as her eyes focused on the mirror behind me, and she saw what I had been staring at.

Genevieve D'Amoretto, my famously missing, presumed-dead-in-a-boating-explosion fiancé Genevieve, was standing just within the main arch.  Her eyes locked onto mine.  She smiled, or, at least, the left side of her face smiled – I could not tell what the right side was doing behind the bejewelled mask that concealed it.  The gems in her green evening gown highlighted the flawless skin on her left shoulder as well as the burn scars on her right.

Genevieve strode at me through the crowd like a shark through herring as suited men spread out along the walls to either side of the entry arch.  Four such men flanked her father, Armand D'Amoretto, as he prowled towards me in Genevieve's wake.  He was not smiling, and I knew that Genevieve's version of that fateful night had not matched the woeful tale of loss I had offered the police and media after I'd been pulled from a sea full of charred, floating wreckage.  I wondered if I would live long enough to find out how she had survived.

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