Myfanwy

And so, what of Shayde?

Shayde seemed to disappear off the face of the world, or so we thought.

It was some years later on a Saturday morning. There was a knock on the door. Our eldest child answered.

I heard Alice talking to a woman and followed Alice to the door to be astounded by the presence of Shayde. Shayde must have seen my face drop because she started mumbling something about this being a silly idea.

I cut her off inviting her in and calling to Myfanwy who came into the room holding our youngest.

Shayde was dressed far more conservatively than we remembered. It seems the loss of her brother and the events surrounding it had shocked her horribly. She had to become Lenny's care giver. She found herself without support and estranged from her former friends. She had subsequently sought support with a religious group; and so had now come to our house to confess what she had done and to ask for our forgiveness.

Forgiveness was easy but Myfanwy did not want to rekindle their friendship. Myfanwy just wanted that period to be a blip on our memory. She was happy that Shayde was happy but she had learnt from the trauma, packaged it and had stacked it away.

As time goes the events seem to have been a brief aberration in our otherwise happy life. We have new friends now and new interests. Blake and I regretfully never fully recovered our friendship. Perhaps one day we will but that all depends on Sarah.

I did run in to Blake from time to time. But the meeting was usually brief and cordial although we were known to have a beer together once or twice. Sarah though was one of those people that can carry a grudge to the grave.

As Shayde left, Myfanwy put the baby down grabbed my arm leaning her head against me. We were finally a team sharing our life rather than competing. I think I can now trust Myfanwy, why?

I have never had any evidence that she physically cheated on me but with Jase. Myfanwy is fundamentally honest. She never made an outright lie to me. Oh, technically she lied through omission perhaps and there was what she thought of as flirting, but I sense that she would draw the line there. You see when I challenged her on the idea that omission was lying by default, her fair skin went bright red. I have always thought I had a natural lie detector there. In fact it goes bright red whenever she is embarrassed about anything.

That said, I do have her honesty to live up to, I mean, can she trust me? Well I guess time will tell. Is it possible that I could stray? Yes; but is it probable? I like to think definitely not. But really, I look at our history and we have both had temptations since then and neither has succumbed. Maybe Dad was right. Commitment is the key.

And what keeps that commitment intact.

One look at those sad puppy dog eyes and my heart melts; one flash of that radiant toothy smile and my whole day is made!

* * * * *

Epilogue

I had run into Blake at one of those product expositions. It was very crowded so we grabbed coffees and slipped outside to catch up on a few things.

"How's the muscle car?" I ventured.

"Shit, nah, pony car, Shetland pony car I'd say. I unloaded that crap before I left Wellington."

"Really, I didn't know."

"Plastic as shit on the inside, fuckin' unreliable, two recalls, and the rusting, I decided they were crap. I swapped pony for finesse."

"What do you have now; Holden V8 or something?"

"Get off the grass! Now you're talking Aussie donkey car!!"

"Excuse my ignorance; what then?"

"McLaren 600 LT Spider."

"Not planning on saving the planet, I take it?"

"Yeah, well I'm good. I kept my mountain bike."