When the box of advance author copies arrived today, I cried. Tears of joy, mostly. I opened it using the vintage stork scissors I brought home from Scotland. I’d had them since I was a child, my mother bought two pairs – one for me and one for her. They were almost all I had left to remember her by, and they looked good as new once they’d been in the dishwasher made the experience extra special for me. I kept one pair and deliberately left the other set behind at Blackwater Chapel, because it’s time to move on, and some things are best left in the past. Those scissors marked the end of an unpleasant woman chapter in our lives, and today they helped to reveal our new future, by opening a box of books. The novel has already been sold all over the world – twenty translations so far. I don’t care whose name is on the cover, we know it’s our story, and that’s all that matters to me.
Nobody needs to know that Henry Winter was my father.
Or that he is dead.
Or what happened to your second wife.
It still upsets me that she was ever your wife at all. It made me so happy when you took off your wedding ring while we were still in Scotland and threw it in the loch, as though you wanted to leave the past behind us too. I tried to remove your mother’s sapphire engagement ring from Amelia’s lifeless hand before we left. Not because I wanted it back, but because she never deserved to wear it in the first place. It wouldn’t come off her finger, no matter how hard I tried to twist or pull the damn thing, and it bothered me more than it should have. Some people are as stubborn in death as they are in life.
I’m not saying everything is perfect, there’s no such thing. Marriage is hard work sometimes. It can also be heartbreaking, and sad, but any relationship worth having is worth fighting for. People have forgotten how to see the beauty in imperfection. I cherish what we have now, despite it being bloodied and a little torn around the edges. At least what we have is real.
We still have secrets, but not from each other anymore.
I always think it is best to look forward, never back. But if we hadn’t got divorced, then next year would have been our thirteenth anniversary. The traditional gift is meant to be lace, and I already know what I’m going to give you. Although I’ll be the one wearing a new wedding dress, it will be for you. Everything I do always has been.
Your Robin
xx
Adam
Books can be mirrors for whoever holds them, and people don’t always like what they see.
The last six months have been good, and I feel as if my life is back on track. Robin is home again, and has redecorated every inch of our house; it’s almost as though Amelia was never here. I’m so happy that Robin is back, so is Bob, I think we both needed her far more than I ever realised. I might not be able to see what she looks like on the outside, but my wife is a beautiful person, inside. Where it matters. Nothing she could ever do will change the person I see when I look at her. Rock Paper Scissors is finally getting made, and even though the opening titles will say ‘based on the novel by Henry Winter’ I can live with that. Dealing with difficult authors is so much easier when they are dead. It turns out my wife is just as good at writing thrilling horror stories as her father was. Perhaps it isn’t surprising. The scariest haunted houses are always the ones in which you are the ghost.
I think there comes a point in everyone’s life when you just have to do what you want to do. Chasing the dream becomes involuntary, you have to, because we all know time is not infinite. And I’ve been chasing this for so long, didn’t I deserve to catch up with my dreams eventually? I like to think so. I have the best job in the world, but writing is a hard way to make an easy living. If I thought I could be happy doing anything else, I would absolutely do that instead.
Despite everything, I’m sleeping better than ever before. My nightmares have stopped completely since we returned from Scotland, almost like I left the pain of my past behind. Perhaps because I finally have some sense of closure about what happened when I was a boy.
I still think about my mother and the way she died every day. And although the nightmares have stopped, the guilt has never gone away. It was my fault and nothing will ever change that. If I’d walked the dog myself – like my mother asked me to – she wouldn’t have been out on the street that night, and the car wouldn’t have hit her. But thirteen-year-old me was angry because he watched my mother do her hair, spray her perfume, paint her face, and wrap herself up in the red kimono like a free gift. She only wore it when a man was coming to stay the night at ours. She said they were friends, but the flat had paper-thin walls, and none of my friends made noises like that.