A Secret Kept

Flora Blunt was eighty-two year of age and for fifty-eight of those years she had hidden a terrible secret. A secret so vile that had it ever come out she would have been ostracised and banished from polite society and in all likelihood excommunicated by the church. She had been married to her husband George – bless him for the gentle man that he was – for forty years and she had never so much as breathed a word of it to him. She would never have dared and even if she had, she wouldn’t have been able to stand the look of disgust in his eyes.

George was a gentle man, a kind and loving man, who loved her with all his heart. But if even he, who loved her so well, had ever learned of the dark and filthy secret in her past, he would have ended their marriage at once. So she had never told him and they had had a happy marriage. Well, as happy as a marriage can be when one of the partners is eaten up inside with guilt. Her mother and father had never known, if they had, she felt that they would have thrown her out in the street and wouldn’t have hesitated to report her to the authorities. Maybe she should have taken the chance and told them, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it and then they passed away and it was too late.

Now after fifty-eight years of keeping such a secret locked inside flora was tired, oh so tired and she felt it was the time to unburden herself of all that guilt. But whom could she take into her confidence? There were three women in the Carrick Home for the elderly that she considered friends. Mary Thoms, Rose Peterson and Alice Jones. They were all a little older than her, Mary was ninety-two, Rose was eighty-nine and Alice the youngest was eighty-seven.