Chapter 48 Helena
Helena
‘What have I done?’ Helena says aloud, a small part of her hoping the empty room might offer her reassurance.
She reminds herself she had no choice but to tell Damon about his father.
That he wouldn’t have needed to dig much deeper to discover the truth by himself.
And where might that have left the two of them?
Damon would likely never trust her again.
At least she can manage him, now he’s heard it from her.
Well, as best she can. Sometimes she forgets he’s a grown man and no longer that quiet, confused little lad who came into her life a decade and a half ago, with only the clothes on his back.
Then, she was in control and he did what she asked of him.
Helena recalls how she rejected him outright when he first turned up on her doorstep.
‘Absolutely not,’ she said firmly, and crossed her arms. ‘He can’t stay here. It wouldn’t be right.’
She had always maintained a distance between her personal life and her job.
Taking Damon in wouldn’t so much blur the lines as erase them.
However, she allowed herself to be talked into it.
To take him in, to take him on. But she agreed only on the provision it was her way or not at all.
And she meant it. She gave them no choice but to accept.
And her way proved to be in the boy’s best interests.
By the time Damon left her care a couple of months later, he was a different child.
The transformation surprised all involved.
In the years that followed, he checked in with her less and less often, but she didn’t take that personally.
It only meant she had done her job. And while the strokes then did their best to ensure the demise of her fostering career, she could take comfort knowing Damon turned out to be the best version of himself any of them could have hoped for.
But today, the ill wind she’s harnessed for so many years is threatening to develop into a storm.
And there are going to be casualties, now he knows Ralf Lister is still alive.
Before Damon left, she tried talking him out of tracking down his father.
She hopes she made a persuasive argument, warning him of the irrevocable harm he might do to himself to meet a man like that.
A man who had admitted to such brutality.
‘I know how introspective you can be, how much you question yourself,’ she’d told him.
‘How you can dwell too much on the negative side of your character and how that can impede your progress through life. I worry that confronting your dad might make you question yourself and who you are. Remember: he hasn’t shaped your personality.
You have. DNA is all you have in common. And you are so much more than that.’
As Damon bade her farewell soon after, Helena was still trying to convince herself she might have succeeded in persuading him to let the past lie.
But if Damon is willing to literally die, again and again, in his search for his truth, then why would her words make him stop now? Not when he is closer than ever.
Perhaps she shouldn’t have got involved. Not asked an old colleague of hers to redact the report to hide the facts.
The stress of the unknown, of what is to come next, aggravates her.
Her head pulses and she pushes her forefingers into her crown.
It’s become a more common occurrence since Damon came back into her life – and she can’t keep blaming it on a migraine.
It’s more than that. When black spots interrupt her vision, she can do nothing but shut her eyes tightly in the hope they will go away.
But she knows they won’t. Because this is what happened before.