Inara

She would take the seat beside him in the dining room, her face as blank as the cheques he had written her back then in the days when they first met. Cheques of his love, he, a disbeliever of both word and concept of promises, had proudly called them. They had been filled with words like forever and endless, words that painted a most irresistible portrait of an eternal paradise on the hell-ravaged canvass of her mind's eyes.

Words that rolled off his tongue like honey and landed on the parched, drought-ridden land of her young heart, Manna in its own right.

Words that, today, formed the ice in the bottomless pit that had once been her soul.

She would watch him as he approached, the pigment of his cheerfulness tainted by the hue of his deception, so that he smiled a smile that did not quite reach his eyes.

He would ask her that unnecessary question of what it was she had prepared for dinner, a question of which she noticed he had grown fond, even as he unveiled the meal served before him, gently removing the cover from the ceramic dish that had been one of their many wedding presents.

And she? She would bask subtly, silently, in her new-found knowledge of his lies, looking away as though distracted by Tutu, their tottering four year old, when he, between swallows of Eba and his beloved Okazi soup, would grumble that the relentless caller he was ignoring was a business partner that did not have the rare gifts of common sense and ethic.

Perhaps, at that point, she would call on Mary, the housemaid, and ask that Tutu be taken upstairs to bed, a most irrelevant instruction for the diligent help who did not need reminders concerning her duties.

It was stupid, the games they played. Inara knew it, and she was certain Henry did too. But she would do anything to maintain the undauntedness, the facade of bold ignorance that was her stance as long as he continued to walk the path of trampling upon the flowers that he, once upon a time, had painstakingly watered to bloom.

And she would get her revenge in time.

She was determined to.

But for the moment, she would let her smile cut through the pain in her chest the way a rainbow slices through the clouds on a stormy day. She had been through hell before, its unquenching fires rolling through her bones night after night as the man, her stepfather, forcefully slipped his wretchedness into hers.

And she could go through it again.

She had been stupid to think she was meant for anything else, after all.

Inara shivered as the sound of a horn pierced through the quiet night. Mentally drained, she began to make her way downstairs for her role in the routinely farce she and Henry acted in front of their household.

She met him at the front door and, taking his briefcase from him, accepted his offered hug and kiss while Tutu, tugging at his legs, cried for ice-cream.

Act one, scene one, she thought, momentarily detached from herself so that she became an audience of one to the drama before her.

Act one, scene one.

• Itari Eki-Allen