Faces of Love by Lily Orevba

Author:Lily Orevba [Orevba, Lily]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781644340776
Publisher: Typewriter Pub
Published: 2019-10-17T18:30:00+00:00

***

“Easy there, beautiful,” Stuart said.

Alice’s hands shook as she tried to administer Stuart’s drugs. She nodded to his words, trying to still her heartbeat but failing at the same time. Alice could hardly focus on anything, her mind was unable to take hold of any instruction and her ears could barely hear anything as her mind replayed her day in the store with Gloria.

“Especially by the town’s whore.”

The statement was shocking enough to cause Alice to drop the dress in her hands. She had been on her way to ask for Gloria’s help getting into the gold dress, when the sight of a strange man holding Gloria captive, forced her to a halt.

“It’ll do you well to keep to this particular appointment, Gloria. I do not take too kindly to being kept waiting.” his gruff voice filtered to where Alice stood, filling her with an odd feeling of discomfort.

Annoyed by his complete disrespect for her employer’s wife, Alice almost ran up to the scene to rescue Gloria from his claw-like grip, when he suddenly released Gloria, his next words causing the blood to drain from her face;

“Especially by the town’s whore.”

Clamping her hands over her lips as a loud gasp threatened to escape, she fell back against the shelf, her eyelids widening and her heart threatening to leap out of her chest.

Whore!

Suddenly, she remembered, the stranger’s words pulling at the strings of her memory, until she was no longer standing in the store, but on the streets of San Francisco, her fingers barely clinging to the shopping basket in her hands as she stood among the crowd, staring at a strange woman make her way down the streets, a parasol in hand.

“Whore…”

She heard the word again, this time, being hurled at the woman who seemed unbothered by it. She instead kept her eyes on the path before her, her chin up and her shoulders straight.

“Shameless woman…” Someone in the crowd called.

“A disgrace to humanity…” Someone else said.

“Get out of our town!” Someone called a little louder than the rest, gaining the woman’s attention. Pausing in her tracks, she turned to the side, a thin smile curving her lips.

“Gloria.” The word barely formed on Alice’s lips as the memory rendered her motionless for several minutes.

Gloria! Gloria was the town’s whore! Gloria was the woman she had seen that summer afternoon when she had been visiting with an aunt. Forced to journey to San Francisco to assist her Aunt Lucy with the birth of her fifth child, Alice had been on her way to the store when she had witnessed the scene. Suddenly, the woman on the streets that afternoon was no longer a faceless stranger, she had a name: Gloria Sullivan!

The information had deprived Alice of sleep all through the night with several questions racing through her mind. She wondered if Howard knew who he was married to; she wondered why Gloria agreed to marry Howard; she wondered if Stuart knew his daughter-in-law was a prostitute; most of all, Alice wondered what she was expected to do with this kind of information.

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