"She looked furious." said Terry.
"I'm sure she would never do something foolish!" Selina assured.
"You don't sound too convinced." said Bruce.
"You mean foolish like?" asked Terry.
"I will go and see if I can't find her!" exclaimed Selina.
And disregarding everything, she went out.
Selina knew Helena would have to see sense. Although she wasn't too convinced she would. She'd said Helena wouldn't do anything foolish, but she wasn't convinced. She knew just how impulsive Helena was. And with this, she had to admit to herself that she wasn't too sure.
I've been made a fool of! Helena thought, furiously. She hardly needed words to express her emotions to her cats. They were just as upset as she was. And everyone was in on it, she knew now. Mai, Terry, why even Maven, she was sure. Or maybe Maven didn't know. She really wished she didn't. At least that would be something. She wouldn't be the only one who didn't know.
But now she would be making a fool of herself, if she thought, because she was sure Maven knew as well. She really had hoped she was wrong. She had refused to believe that the only people she trusted would have lied to her.
But it wasn't really a lie, she thought. They just had never told her the whole truth. Which was just as bad, wasn't it?
"We've been fooled." she said aloud, although between her and her cats there was no need for words. "You see, one should never trust humans. They lie."
The cats seemed to agree with her. They understood her and she them without words, only with gestures, which she especially used with her deaf cat.
"Mina," she said, although the cat was deaf. "I never really doubted you. Why did you choose him? It was because I chose to trust him, wasn't it? And I chose very wrong. So wrong."
People were obviously more complicated than she had ever thought. Maybe there was a reason for all this. But she would never find that out sitting here.
Usually, the one person she would turn to when she was faced with something like this was her mother. But, she remembered, she couldn't trust her. Not anymore. And there was no one else. Her cats couldn't give her an answer. And she couldn't trust her mai.
But she had to trust Mai, she thought. She had to. She had no one else, did she? Not that she minded being alone. After all, cats were solitary predators, and one would always be used to being alone, if that was necessary. Even when they lived others, as her own cats did. Mai was the important person in her life. But now that was impossible. It was, she thought, like a kitten unable to trust a queen.
Selina had told Terry not to look for Helena. That might just make things worse, she'd said. And Helena said she would never talk to him again. And knowing her, she just might not.
It looked like it had been a mistake, to not have told her the truth. He had thought she might have suspected they were hiding something from her, but Selina said she was sure there was no way she could find out.
Why hadn't he thought to watch her cats more closely? He should have learned to take them more into account. To him, they were only Helena's pets, and nothing else. And even if he hadn't, he knew she worked around actors.
He shouldn't have let her do the portrait, either. Maybe that was what made her suspect. But it didn't seem like anything at the time. And she had been willing to give him all of the things her mother had stolen, even if she did it grudgingly.
If he had told her himself, she wouldn't have been so angry as she was, if she'd heard it from him, he knew. He shouldn't have told her that Selina knew, either. Helena had her mother on a pedestal, and the fact that she'd known, could have only made things worse. She must have found that more upsetting than anything else.
Now the only thing to do was to hope she would understand. She would just have to understand it had been for her own safety. He remembered it had taken Dana a while to understand that when he told her. But Helena may not be as understanding.