She inhaled the scents deeply and picked a good spot to sit.
This time, Alan placed himself very near her. He took her hand and leaned forward to kiss her on the cheek.
She felt his comfortable warmth, but soon another woman's image came to her mind.
She moved away a little.
"I won't do it again if you don't want me to."
"Are you in love with Adelle?"
He reared his back with a shocked motion.
"Excuse me?"
"I've seen the way you look at her. I know you have special feelings for her."
Alan started to analyze how she could have reached that conclusion. Little by little he realized.
But she interpreted those seconds as evidence of his double game and moved farther away.
"I thought I was better at hiding my interest." Despite the moment, he couldn't help but shift his concern to wondering whether Adelle herself would have noticed anything. And the longer he kept thinking, the worse things got with Roxanne.
"The reason that brought me from the Earth was her," he finally began to confess. "Some years ago, I found out her identity and location, and I decided I had to speak with her. But until I met Joseph, I hadn't actually had the chance to come and do it. Adelle is my mother."
The girl in red felt that something which had gone up to her neck and oppressed her started to go back down to her stomach, causing her nausea in the process.
"I spent my childhood days in several orphanages. One day, a classmate I was not particularly fond of declared he wished to become a doctor when he grew up. I then resolved to surpass him. Just imagine, I, who up until then wouldn't go near a book… It wasn't easy to get the means, the scholarships… But I finally made it. You could say I'm a doctor just for the hell of it… To pester a guy whose name I don't even remember."
Alan kept holding the hand he hadn't yet let go of.
"What I found out about Adelle was that she was one of the prostitutes Leonard brought to populate his colony. However, that was after she'd had me and abandoned me.
I wanted to know if there were any reasons to stop imagining her as a person reckless enough to have kids and just carelessly leave them wherever. I wanted to give her the chance to explain, even if that didn't change my concept of her, for she had a mountain to climb already. But, it turns out I've spent a year travelling through space, another year and a half - more than a year and a half - on this planet, summoning up the nerve… And, when I finally make it to where she is and meet her… I can't find the courage to tell her I'm her son."