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else.”
    “I knew for a few weeks,” Sarah said after watching her hands on the vents. By now, they were toasty, but the warm, burning feeling soothed her. “I knew, I got scared, I ran back to a party, and then you guys told me off when I got back. After, I wasn’t sure how to tell you, and if I said anything, I felt like I would be betraying you or dad. I chose wrong …” Sarah decided it was easier feeling the heater burn the tips of her fingers, so she did it, letting her mum eat up all those huge words.
    “I can’t stay with him, and it’s nothing to do with you. I love you so much, Sarah. But I would rather be a role model and stand up against being treated like a … no, he treated old Lucky better than I was treated. I’m leaving him not to show off my rights as a woman, but as a person with morals, and as a role model for you, my daughter. Your dad isn’t a bad man to the bone, but he’s made mistakes too big to forgive after all these years of his lies, and I don’t have to have a partner to keep me company who goes on and hurts my heart. You can come live with me if you want. I won’t mind if you go with him, though. I know you love him lots.”
    Sarah looked at her mum from under her lashes, not moving her head.
    Her mum said lots that Sarah could have responded to, but Sarah replayed the phrase, To forgive after all these years of lies in her mind.
    Sarah felt like she too were a pawn in her dad’s game. Her dad didn’t care about her after all. How could her daddy have a whole other life for all that time and not tell her? Sarah even told her dad first when she got her period.
    Sarah asked to go to McDonald’s. It was the middle of the night before they drove back home. Sarah was full of sweet crunchy pieces of candy, and bloated with fries and ice cream. But she was sick knowing too much about her mum, who had read so many of her words and was hurting because of them.
    Sarah had so much weighing her down that, when she got home and her mum tucked her in, she didn’t remember falling asleep, but she knew she didn’t even get to think up a poem, like she usually did, before she went to bed.
    It was then she realised it was all too much for a teenager like her. And she wondered what type of guy she’d ever love, if not even someone as perfect as her dad could be trusted.

HUSH BUSINESS
    NOW
     
    He took her past the food court, which made Sarah wonder where they could be going. On first dates it was usually a coffee that the guy would buy her, and even with friends, if they weren’t at the movies or a bar, they’d go to a café for coffee or the like.
    But he took her into a shop called City Guy. He brushed his fingers past hangers of different coloured business shirts—white, beige, blue, even pink—and settled for a thin pin-striped patterned shirt that Sarah had her eye on. She followed him to the dress pants and they all seemed the same but, in a similar manner, he brushed his fingers along the tops, snagging one into his fist and flipping it over, only to settle on another one that seemed identical, anyway.
    Sarah found a wheelie stool and sat, waiting on it, outside his change cubicle. After moments, images of him unbuttoning and pulling his sleeves off his arms flustered her, and she turned and fixed her hair in the mirror. She unwound her hair tie and swung her locks out so it fanned over her back and her shoulders. She even combed her fingers through it to remove tangles, but now it looked like she was trying to impress him so she picked it up, twisted her hair, and piled it up in a loose bun on top of her head.
    Sarah was securing the hair tie back in place as his cubicle door swung in, and his fingers emerged, then the rest of him in his pin-striped shirt and black slacks. Her hair fell from her grip, and she blinked a few times, rapidly. It was then she remembered to smile, which she did as she stood, and moved to the side so he could step out and show her the full