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Verity frowned, automatically checking her speed as she realised she was approaching the local school and that it was that time in the afternoon when the children were coming out.
It was the same school she had attended herself, although her memories of being there were not entirely h
appy due, in the main, to the fact that her uncle’s strictness and obsession with her school grades had meant that she had not been allowed to mingle freely with her classmates. During the long summer evenings when they had gone out to play, she had had to sit working at home under her uncle’s eagle eye. It had been his intention that her father, who had worked alongside him in the business and who had been his much younger brother, would ultimately take over from him, but her father’s untimely death had put an end to that and to the possibility that he might have further children—sons.
Her uncle’s own inability to father children had been something that Verity had only discovered after his death and had, she suspected, been the reason why he had never married himself.
She was clear of the school now and the houses had become more widely spaced apart, set in large private gardens.
Knowing that she would shortly be turning off the main road, Verity automatically started to brake and ten seconds later was all too thankful that she had done so as, totally unexpectedly, out of a small newsagent’s a young girl suddenly appeared on a pair of roller blades, skidded and shot out into the road right in front of Verity’s car.
Instinctively and immediately Verity reacted, braking sharply, turning the car to one side, but sickeningly she still heard the appalling sound of a thud against the front wing of the car as the girl collided with it.
Frantically Verity tugged at her seat belt with trembling fingers, her heart thudding with adrenalin-induced horror and fear as she ran to the front of the car.
The girl was struggling to her feet, her face as ashen as Verity knew her own to be.
‘What happened? Are you hurt? Can you walk…?’
As she gabbled the frantic questions, Verity forced herself to take a deep breath.
The girl was on her feet now but leaning over the side of the car. She looked all right, but perhaps she had been hurt internally, Verity worried anxiously as she went to put her arm around her to support her.
She felt heartbreakingly thin beneath the bulkiness of her clothes and Verity guessed that she wouldn’t be much above ten. Her grey eyes were huge in her small, pointed white face, and as she raised her hand to push the weight of her long dark hair off her face Verity saw with a thrill of fear that there was blood on her hand.
‘It’s okay,’ the girl told her hesitantly, ‘it’s just a scratch. I’m fine really…It was all my fault…I didn’t look. Dad’s always telling me…’
She stopped talking, her eyes suddenly brimming with tears, her whole body starting to shake with sobs.
‘It’s all right,’ Verity assured her, instinctively taking her in her arms and holding her tight. ‘You’re in shock. Come and sit in the car…’
Glancing up towards the shop the girl had just come from, she asked her gently, ‘Is your mother with you? Shall I…?’
‘I don’t have a mother,’ the girl told her, allowing Verity to help her into the passenger seat of the car where she slumped back, her eyes closed, before adding, ‘She’s dead. She died when I was born. You don’t have to feel sorry for me,’ she added without opening her eyes. ‘I don’t mind because I never knew her and I’ve got Dad and he’s…’
‘I don’t feel sorry for you,’ Verity assured her, adding with an openness that she could only put down to the fact that she too was suffering the disorientating and disturbing effects of shock, ‘I lost both my parents in a car accident when I was six.’
The girl opened her eyes and looked thoughtfully at her. Now that she was beginning to get over her ordeal she looked very alert and intelligent and, in some odd way that Verity couldn’t quite put her finger on, slightly familiar.
‘It’s horrid having people feeling sorry for you, isn’t it?’ the girl said with evident emotion.
‘People don’t mean to be patronising,’ Verity responded. ‘But I do know what you mean…’
‘Dad told me I wasn’t to go outside the garden on my rollers.’ She gave Verity an assessing look. ‘He’ll ground me for ages—probably for ever.’ Verity waited, guessing what was coming next.
‘I don’t suppose…Well, he doesn’t have to know, does he…? I could pay for the damage to your car from my pocket money and…’
What kind of man was he, this father, who so patently made his daughter feel unloved and afraid? A man like her uncle, perhaps? A man who, whilst providing a child with all the material benefits he or she could possibly want, did not provide the far more important emotional ones?
‘No, he doesn’t have to know,’ Verity agreed, ‘as long as the hospital gives you the all clear.’
‘The hospital?’ The girl’s eyes widened apprehensively.
‘Yes, the hospital,’ Verity said firmly, closing her own door and re-starting the car.
She would be being extremely negligent in her duty as a responsible adult if she didn’t do everything within her power to make sure the girl was as physically undamaged as she looked.
‘You have to turn left here,’ the girl began and then looked closely at Verity as she realised she had started to turn without her directions. ‘Do you know the way?’
