The Mistress

by Valerie Keogh

In the pain of abandonment, I remember promising that nobody was ever going to hurt me again. Far better to keep the barricades in place. Mark had come so very close to breaching them but now they were re-enforced and it was time to end something that should never have begun.

Twenty years before, I was too young to realise that not all men were like my father. Not all men left.