The gift

‘What happened to your first love? During this uncertain time, more and more people have been looking up their old flames.”

It was the magazine article that did it. It took Susie back to when she was 15 years old. The day her mother had read her diary. It was only a collection of teenage warblings. Flights of imagination! She hadn’t meant to do the things she said she was going to. If only she’d hidden the diary under her bed, her mother would never have found it. But she’d rung the boy’s mother and together they’d agreed that Susie and Matthew must never meet again.

That had been 31 years ago! Teenagers would never allow that nowadays. Can you imagine if she’d done the same to her three, wondered Susie, as she applied her Apricot Sunrise lipstick? Maybe that’s why she’d been more tolerant with them. Perhaps too much so. At least, that’s