When we got back to our Maths-themed room, things weren’t adding up for me. I ate both the chocolates on our pillows while you were in the shower – even though I hate dark chocolate – I guess I wanted to hurt you back somehow, childish as that sounds. My phone buzzed and for a moment I thought it might be you, texting me from the hotel bathroom – nobody else sends me messages late at night. Or in the day. But it wasn’t you, it was my new friend at work saying that they missed me. The idea of anyone missing me made my eyes fill with tears. I sent them the selfie of me at the top of the Statue of Liberty and they replied straight away with a thumbs up. And a kiss.
You’re asleep now, but I’m awake as usual, writing you a letter I’ll never let you read. This time on hotel letterheaded paper. A seven-year rash of resentment might be more accurate than an itch. I can’t be honest with you, but I need to be honest with myself.
I hate don’t like you right now, but I still love you.
Your wife
xx
Robin
Robin stays where she is until both visitors are in the secret study. Then she unlocks the door of the room she’s been hiding in, creeps down the staircase – avoiding the steps she knows will creak – and leaves the chapel. She meets her silent companion exactly where she left him. He does not look impressed about being abandoned out in the cold. Robin does what she needs to do outside as quickly and quietly as she can, then waits.
She’s good at waiting. Practice can make a person good at anything, and at least she isn’t alone this time. The snow has stopped falling but it is still cold. Robin would rather get back to the cottage, but there is no point rushing something this important. She has been careful to step in the visitors’ earlier footprints, but trying to go unnoticed isn’t always easy. That’s the problem with following in someone else’s footsteps; if you leave a bigger mark than they did they tend to get upset. Robin learned the hard way that it’s always best to take her time, and late is better than never. Sometimes the early bird eats too many worms and dies.
Stained-glass windows are beautiful, but they let the cold in and the sound out, which is why she is listening outside the one in the study. She unlocked the secret door and left it open deliberately, so that the visitors could find it for themselves. Once the penny drops things shouldn’t take too much longer.
Listening to them in the place where she used to live, and laugh, and dream, is such a strange and surreal experience. A bit like food poisoning. She feels sick and feverish, but already knows she’ll feel better again once she gets whatever was rotten out of her system. She wants the visitors out of the chapel, but not yet. There is still too much to say and do before this unpleasant chapter in her life can come to an end.
‘Everything will be OK, you’ll see,’ she says to her companion, but he doesn’t reply. He just stares back at her, looking as sad and cold as she is starting to feel.
Whenever her life has taken a wrong turn in the past, Robin has tried to pinpoint the exact moment she got lost. There always is one. If you are prepared to open your eyes, and look far enough back, you can normally see the instant you made a poor choice, said something you shouldn’t, or did something you lived to regret. One bad decision often leads to another and then, before you know it, there is no way back to where you were.
But everyone makes mistakes.
Sometimes, the most innocent-seeming people turn out to be guilty of horrific things. Sometimes, the people who do bad things are just bad people. But there is always a reason why a person behaves the way that they do. The woman at the local store was a good example of someone with a much darker past than you’d expect. Patty the unfriendly shopkeeper, with her red face, beady eyes, bad breath, and a habit of short-changing strangers, had a list of convictions longer than the Bible she kept behind the counter, from aggravated assault to driving when over the limit. Everyone in town knew, but they had to get their supplies from somewhere. Few people are genuinely capable of forgiveness, and nobody ever really forgets. Sometimes you just know a person is bad news as soon as you meet them, because they’re rotten, inside and out, and instinct tells you to stay away.
Lives carry on regardless of whether the people they belong to do. Robin wanted to move on, she tried so hard to put her own mistakes behind her, and not be consumed by regrets. But our secrets have a habit of finding us, and everything she tried to run away from caught up with her eventually. Covering her present with the dust of her past.
Her companion starts to fidget.