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Kate slipped naked from the king-size bed and stood for a moment in the da
rk, looking down at the sleeping form of Michael Riordan.  She closed her eyes and took a deep breath,
Oh God, what have I done?
  She moved quietly across the room towards the en suite bathroom, her slender form ghostly pale in the faint streetlight coming in through the open curtains.  She slipped into the green-tiled bathroom and locked the door before switching on the light.  She leaned over the sink and peered at her reflection in the mirror before screwing up her face in dismay;
what have I done?

In the harsh fluorescent light she looked haggard rather than slim, and far older than her thirty-four years, her eyes
were hidden in deep pockets of shadow and her lips were tight and pale.  She stared at her reflection dispassionately for some time before dropping her gaze to her naked body.  No problem there; after years of remorseless dieting and exercising in search of the perfect figure she could look at her body without a qualm and even with a touch of pleasure.  Of pride in her hard work, if nothing else.  It was only when she raised her gaze back to the reflection of her face that the problem began.  She pushed her long hair away from her face and almost glared into the mirror.  When she had set out that evening she had been young and at least reasonably attractive; now her eyes were too big for her face and she looked haggard and old.  As old as sin, as old as guilt.  She shut her eyes again; w
hat have I done?  And with my patient’s father!

She could never have imagined where the evening would end up considering the
appalling way it had begun.  She had met Michael outside the restaurant as planned but just as they were about to go inside Martin Wilson had accosted them.  He had been very drunk and had roared abuse at her for invading his privacy and for “poking her bloody nose in where it wasn’t wanted”.  Riordan’s Special Branch bodyguard had appeared as if by magic to grab his arm and bustle him away but even he could not stop Wilson shouting furiously back to her that George Meagher was innocent, and that she would regret it if she smeared his good name.

Almost dying with emba
rrassment she had muttered, ‘I’m most awfully sorry, Michael!  I never dreamed that awful man would turn up here!  I don’t know him or anything, he’s connected with my latest book, on sex offenders.’

‘Well, he doesn’t seem very happy about it!’ Michael had replied, smiling lightly at her and apparently not fazed in the slightest. 
‘Still, even in these celebrity-mad times not everyone wants to be famous.  At least, not as a sex offender.’  He had taken her arm and ushered her into the restaurant, not turning a hair even when Wilson began shouting from a distance, ‘You’ll be sorry, bitch!  You wait and see!  You’ll be
sorry
!’

Michael
hadn’t asked any questions about Wilson either, and when she had tried to apologize for the scene had waved her explanation away, saying, ‘Don’t be silly; I’m a politician, I get worse shouted at me on a daily basis!  I’m glad there weren’t any reporters about, though; there’s usually one lurking near me nowadays and I dread to think what they would have made of that little lot!’

Her mouth had fallen open in horror at the mere idea and he had laughed and reassured her, ‘Don’t worry, they generally only turn up when my press secretary tells them where I’m going.’  He had winked and whispered conspiratorially, ‘
Officially I’m having a quiet night in!’

In spite of this
inauspicious beginning she had enjoyed the evening, and found herself increasingly glad she had agreed to dine with him.  She had also, as the evening wore on, found herself increasingly attracted to the immaculately dressed and coiffured Michael.  She had even taken a certain proprietorial pride in the sidelong glances aimed at him from other women in the restaurant, foolish though that was.  For one thing she had no claim on him whatsoever, and for another much of the attention was probably due to the fact that he was the most famous government Minster in Ireland.

He had been
the perfect companion; witty, urbane, charming; he met every criteria perfectly.  He had been able to talk fluently on just about any subject, either amusingly or thoughtfully, as occasion demanded.  He was also, perhaps more surprisingly in a politician, able to listen.  Listen with apparently genuine interest.  So well did they connect, and so easily did the conversation flow, that the whole subject of his daughter had somehow been pushed into the background.  How far a politician’s smooth, easy charm could be trusted was debatable but he had really seemed interested in her, and she had found herself falling deeper under his spell as the evening progressed.  And look what that had led to. 
Oh, shit.

Even now she was finding it hard to believe that she had gone back to his apartment with
him, ostensibly for a coffee, but with both of them knowing what was coming.  He had said, with a little smile, that he had told his flat mate about her, and warned him to return to his work base in Cork a day early, and she had smiled in acceptance of his meaning rather than his words.  She closed her eyes again;
had
she
quite
lost
her
mind
?  Getting involved with a patient’s father?  She wasn’t sure if it breached her professional code of ethics –it was certainly nothing compared to sleeping with a patient- but it definitely breached her personal ethics. 
Why had she done it? 
Michael was attractive, yes, but
that
attractive?  No.  The bottom line was that she was lonely, not just for company but for physical affection, for the touch of another human being.  Although she knew all about her fear of commitment she hadn’t realized that she was equally scared of being alone.  Even though her life, before Peter, had consisted of a succession of short-term relationships, each of which served an immediate purpose without ever fulfilling her.

Kate
smiled wryly at her own reflection; she couldn’t even blame the wine as she had only had two glasses.  She flushed the toilet and brushed her teeth using Michael’s toothbrush, in spite of a sudden, unreasonable reluctance to touch anything belonging to him.  After what they had just done together prudery over using his toothbrush was foolish, but she had to overcome a stab of revulsion nonetheless.  She returned to the bedroom and looked down at the sleeping Michael, knowing that she could not now spend the night with him as she had intended.  Not until she sorted out the confusion of her feelings.  Because while she was being honest with herself she might as well go all the way; was tonight just her way of finishing with Peter once and for all?  In her own mind, at least?  She had told Peter it was over, and had not seen him in weeks, but this act was the
decree absolute,
wasn’t it?  Because now there was no going back even if she wanted to.

Not that I did,
she hastily told herself,
I positively did not want to see him again. 
But that was not entirely true.  Although she had definitely wanted to finish it a part of her had of course wondered if she was making a mistake; after being with him for so long she would have had to be more than human to feel any other way.  And now at least she
couldn’t
go back.

As she began quiet
ly dressing she felt no release, only a vague sorrow.  Because this didn’t feel like freedom.  Rather it smacked of a desperate burning of her boats, a way of ending her conflict without ever really confronting it.  A cold hand gripped her heart as it occurred to her that her feelings for Peter might not be as dead as she had believed, as she had told herself.  She put it all from her mind, refusing to think about it anymore; it could wait until the morrow.

S
he slipped noiselessly out of the still apartment and walked the empty streets until she found a taxi to take her to where she had parked, just off St. Stephen’s Green.  It was only when she was back in her own car that her composure returned, and some perspective.  She started the engine and drove away, a little too fast as usual, grimacing ruefully as she drove; the sex hadn’t even been that good.  Pleasurable enough but certainly not worth all this agonizing.  She was young, free and single, at liberty to do whatever she pleased, with whomever pleased
her.
  Sleeping with a patient’s father was nothing to be proud of, but it wasn’t a crime either, and she needn’t beat herself up about it.

She was out of the
quiet city now and well on her way to the two-bedroom basement apartment in Monkstown that she was trying to learn to call home.  It was a nice flat, in a nice area, but in her mind
home
was still the house in Dalkey in which she had grown up.  After her father had..
.been killed,
her mother had brought her to live with her sister Josie and her family.  Between Uncle George, her Aunt Josie and their four boys that house had been Kate’s -an only child- first real experience of what she had come to consider
proper
family life.  Fights, shouting, mess, sharing, noise and love had poured over quiet, shy, damaged Kate like a warm tidal wave of uninhibited emotion, and within a few short weeks the chaos of the Turner household felt like home to her.  Her cousins had made her feel like one of the family from the start, and as the only girl in the house -albeit a chubby twelve year old with braces- they had jealously fought one another for her attention.

Kate smiled
to herself as she remembered how her first boyfriend, when she was sixteen, had had to run the gauntlet of her glowering Uncle and four equally hostile cousins, all of whom seemed to be waiting for poor Charlie to make the slightest wrong move before tearing him apart.  Charlie hadn’t lasted long -had not unsurprisingly been scared off- and although furious at the time Kate now realized it was symptomatic of how deeply she had been cocooned in the warmth of their love and concern.

Her Aunt and Uncle had been marvelous right from the very beginning, possibly because they had wanted and been denied a little girl themselves.  Certainly Kate and her mother had never once felt like interlopers, had never fe
lt that they were imposing or were in any way a nuisance.  Which said all that was necessary about the good-heartedness of the Turner family.  Looking back later Kate often thought that the years spent in that house were the happiest of her life.  As a child or an adult.  And after her mother had died, from breast cancer detected too late, Aunt Josie had as good as adopted her, and had comforted her through her difficult late teens before putting Kate through university with her own four.

After Kate had left for England Uncle George had taken advantage o
f the ill-fated Civil Service relocation program to return to his native Cork, and easy-going Aunt Josie had agreed to the move without any great fuss, which was how she dealt with most of life’s crises.  If they had not moved Kate would almost certainly be living with them now, thirty-four or not.  Two of the boys, Sean and Oisin, had remained in Dublin but both were married with young children, so staying with either of them when she returned from England had been out of the question.  Well, in Kate’s mind at least; they had seen things differently and both had tried to get her to stay with them.

What
their respective wives would have thought of this arrangement Kate shuddered to think but she need never find out as she had of course declined.  She considered them more brothers than cousins but wasn’t about to impose herself on them, or on women whom she had met only a handful of times before.  And so in spite of living in the same city they had largely left her life.  They certainly had not forgotten her, but with careers and growing families to occupy them Kate saw less of them than she would have liked.  The house in Dalkey had long since been sold, too, a fact which hurt Kate almost as much as the absence of her Aunt and Uncle; that house was the embodiment of everything good in her childhood, the chalice of almost all her happy memories.

Thinking about it Kate shook her head ruefully, for there was an even better reason than sentiment to have kept the hou
se; she could have lived there.  Even with the housing bubble just a distant memory –and in spite of the royalties from her books- Kate had not been able to afford a place in Dalkey.  At least, not without a mortgage, and there was no way she was tying herself down to one of those until she had a permanent job.  And in any case there was no guarantee the banks would loan her the money; the days of them chucking money at customers, even professionals, were long gone.

After bypassing Blackrock
Kate turned left onto Alton Road and then immediately right onto the quiet terrace of big old houses where she lived.  She parked outside the large Georgian house that had been converted into apartments and made her way down the steps to the basement, her current domain and
almost
home.

Give it time
,
she thought to herself as she fumbled in her bag for the front door keys,
What do you expect after only a couple of months?

She paused at the bottom of the steps, the unwonted darkness setting an alarm bell ringing in her mind;
I left the outside light on this morning when I left...why is it so dark?

She felt a touch of fear as well as the beginnings of doubt. 
Could the bulb simply have blown?  Are you
sure
you left it on?