'Sod you!'
David struck Tom with all the force he could muster, causing his head to snap to one side. But watching Tom's head turn back to face David was as fearful a motion as watching the gun of a tank-turret swivel and come to bear on its target.
'Since there are women present, I am going to afford you the luxury of counting to three. If you're stupid enough to still be here when I'm done, I'll snap your head off like a chicken and impale it on a stake as a warning to anyone else like you who's stupid enough to get up my nose.'
At that point David proved that he hadn't the least bit of sense. He drew back his fist once more- but just as a quiet voice from behind caused him to snatch it back to his side.
'Hello, Davie. Haven't nicked you for a while. 'Til today, that is.'
'I done nowt!' David protested as Chief Inspector Matthews clamped a massive hand on his shoulder.
'Story of your life, isn't it Davie,' the Inspector said, propelling David from the room, then from the house.
Pamela had wisely beat a hasty retreat, ostensibly to let Tessa tend to the tiny cut on Tom's lip. She sighed, now, replaying the incident in her mind. If only things between herself and Theo could be as straightforward! But instead she found that as the day of their wedding drew closer, so did her level of frustration.
An old habit saved her then, but she found herself forced to take a good long look at her old habit of not looking any further ahead than the moment. In the past she had relied on that habit as a substitute for hope. Now, however, it seemed out of place, an anachronism from her former life. Instead of preserving her, she saw that it could very well be leading her into a trap.
She found herself for the first time in her life willing herself to look ahead, daring to blindly trust in the hope that everything would turn out. And in that moment, she discovered something she thought she had known all along, though looking back she could see that she had never known it at all.
It was faith. Not a churchy faith or the born-again variety, or the kind of capital "F" faith that wild-eyed fanatics liked to beat people over the heads with as though desperate to convince others of their own piety, but something simple, innocent, down-to-earth, without a lot of dreck being read into it.
Gone were the days when all the church meant to her was a meal and security- this had been replaced by a solid sense of family and tradition. And in the same breath, gone, too, was the awkward, lonely young woman who had survived despite impossible odds and come out of life's worst trials and nightmares miraculously unscathed. At that moment she knew that there was a reason she had been spared, that she had endured, and though she was still groping around in the dark, blindly learning to live out the promise of her life, in that moment she knew that she had kept that promise as pure and unsullied as the day on which she was born.