A Broken Trust

The house was quiet.

Eerily so.

She noticed that his shoes, socks and pants were strewn about the living area and the hallway leading to the master bedroom.

The door stood open.

She had always made it a point to keep all the doors in the hallway shut.

Her eyes widened with the realization of what was happening, and her anger surged as she mumbled fiercely, "How could he do this to me again?"

She walked quietly down the hallway, dread settling in her midsection, leery of what she would find.

The room was still, but sounds were coming from the master bathroom.

Dare she proceed, when her gut told her that whatever waited around the corner was sure to be her undoing?

As though propelled forward by some unseen force, she continued forward, all at once needing to know the truth, though not sure she was quite ready to face it.

In that moment, she remembered that this was exactly the same way things had happened the last time he had broken her trust.

"And just when I thought we'd worked through all that!" she thought fiercely. "I can't trust him for a minute!" Already, she felt the sting of the betrayal churning within.

Her normally calm countenance became angry.

She stepped silently but swiftly into the master bathroom.

"What have you done?" she asked petulantly.





"Make up?" his tender little voice asked.

She couldn't help but to laugh.

"Yes. Mommy's make-up. And you're not supposed to be messing with mommy's makeup again !"

It was hard to be taken seriously as the disciplinarian when she was taking a picture and/or laughing uproariously.

"How" she asked aloud, "did you manage to do all this in the short time it took me just to clear the dinner table? And how are we ever going to get you to hold still long enough to scrub that mascara off your face?"