Day seventy-two. Pip was only two and a half months into her exile, her purgatory, walking these old, cobbled streets over and over, round and round. She walked, every day, and she made promises. That’s what she did. Promises of how she would be different, how she would be better, how she would deserve her life back and everyone in it.
She would never complain ever again about taking Josh to one of his football matches, and she’d answer his every curiosity, big or small. Be his big sister, his teacher, the person he could look up to, until the day when he outgrew her and she looked up to him instead.
She’d be kinder to her mum, who had only ever wanted the best for her. Pip should have listened more, she should have understood. Pip had taken her for granted: her strength, the roll of her eyes and the reason for her pancakes, and she’d never do that again. They were a team – they had been from the start, from her very first breath – and if Pip could have her life back, they would be a team again, until her mum’s last. Holding hands, old skin on older skin.
Her dad. What she wouldn’t give to hear his easy laugh again, hear him call her his pickle. She would thank him every day, for choosing her and her mum, for everything he’d ever taught her. Tell him all the ways she was like him and so glad for it, how he’d shaped the person she’d become. She just had to become that person again. And if she could, maybe it would happen one day, her dad’s arm in hers as he walked her down that aisle, stopping halfway to tell her how proud he was.
Her friends. She’d always ask them how they were before they could ask her. She wouldn’t let anything get in the way, wouldn’t need them to be understanding because she would be instead. Laugh with Cara until it hurt in phone calls that lasted three hours, Connor’s bad puns and awkward arms, Jamie’s kind smile and big heart, Nat’s strength that she’d always admired so much, Naomi who’d been a big sister to her when Pip needed one most.
And Becca Bell, Pip made a promise to her: she would tell Becca everything when they were both free. Pip had had to cut her off too, missed visits, missed phone calls. But prison wasn’t Becca’s cage; her father had been her cage. He was gone now, but Becca deserved to know everything, about her dad and how he died, about Max, and the part Pip had played. But mostly she deserved to know about Andie. Her big sister who’d known about the monster in their house and did all she could to save Becca from him. She deserved to read Andie’s email and know how much she was loved, that those cruel things Andie said to her in her final moments was really her sister trying to protect her. Andie was terrified that one day their father would kill them both, and maybe she was scared that that would be the thing that made him snap. Pip would tell her all of it. Becca deserved to know that, in another life, she and Andie would have escaped their father, together.
Promises and promises.
Pip would earn them all back, if she got the chance.
It wasn’t Max’s trial she was waiting for, not really. It was hers. Her final judgement. The jury wouldn’t only decide Max’s fate, they would decide hers, whether she could have her life back and everyone in it.
Especially him.
She still spoke to Ravi every day. Not the real one, the one who lived in her head. She spoke to him when she was scared or unsure, asked him what he would do if he were there. He sat beside her when she was lonely, and she was always lonely, looking at old photos on her phone. He told her goodnight and kept her company in the dark while she learned how to sleep again. Pip wasn’t sure any more, if she was getting the timbre of his voice quite right, the exact way he had leaned into his words, whether they lilted or tilted. How had he said ‘Sarge,’ again? Had his voice dipped up or dipped down? She had to remember, she had to hold on, preserve him.
She thought about Ravi every day, almost every moment of every day, seventy-two days full of moments. What he was thinking, what he was doing, whether he’d like the sandwich she’d just eaten – the answer was always yes – whether he was OK, whether he missed her as much as she missed him. Whether that absence had grown into resentment.
She hoped, whatever he was doing, he would learn to be happy again. If that meant waiting for her, waiting for the trial, or if that meant waiting to find someone else, Pip would understand. It broke her heart to think of him doing that crooked smile for anyone else, making up new nicknames, new invisible ways of saying I love you, but that was his choice. All Pip wanted to know was that he was happy, that there was good in his life again, that was all. Her freedom for his, and it was a choice she would make over and over again.