Coerced him… sexual relationship… favourable treatment.
It was absurd, not to mention impossible. It was?—
I stopped walking for a moment, my breath catching.
But it isn’t impossible, is it? It’s just not true.
I forced myself to move again. Several weeks. Precautionary suspension. My life, neatly paused. I should have been filled with pure outrage.
Instead, what made my chest heavy, my breathing laboured, was exposure, as though something private—something carefully contained—had been dragged into the light, distorted into something ugly and unrecognisable.
I haven’t done anything.
That thought didn’t quiet the unease, because it wasn’t the whole truth.
Houses blurred as I walked past them, my mind drifting in fragments.
A face on the street. A man, tall, broad-shouldered, laughing with someone beside him. How my gaze had flickered for a second, before I looked away.
A memory surfaced, unbidden. A queue in a café, the brief awareness of someone standing too close behind me. The warmth of it. The way my body had reacted before my mind could catch up.
I swallowed.
That doesn’t mean anything.
Another memory, this time of the gym changing room. The careful avoidance of looking too long. The awareness that if I did, it might mean something I wasn’t ready to name.
Stop it. This isn’t the same thing.
But the accusation had found a tender spot, close enough to the truth to make it dangerous.
Diana. I’ll have to tell her. But how do I explain something like this? How do you say ‘I’ve been accused’ without it sounding like ‘I’ve done something’?
My throat tightened.
Beneath the fear, the shock, and the confusion, something else stirred.
Something I’d spent years ignoring. Carefully burying.
I reached the front gate, walked up to the door, and paused, my key in my hand. Because once I went inside, once I spoke….
I closed my eyes.Enough.
When I opened them, I unlocked the door and stepped into the house’s cool interior where everything seemed so normal. I stood in the hallway, steadying myself.
“Kieran? What are you doing home at this time?” Diana called out from the dining room.
I pushed the door open. She sat at the table, her laptop open, her notepad beside it, a calculator beside that. She frowned as I entered. “You look awful.”
I took a deep breath.
“We need to talk.”
Chapter Two
Diana straightened. “What’s wrong?”
I pulled out a chair opposite her and sat. “I got called to the Principal’s office this morning.”