Speak soon,
Harriet x
I drop them in the mailbox across the street. They won’t make the Christmas post, but the letters will arrive eventually, and the threat of that is all I need.
Back in the apartment, step one complete, I open a new email and address it to my publisher, Grenville Sinclair. In a flurry of keyboard taps, I outline the changes I intend to make to my manuscript in my next round of edits.
It will be the same story I have told Deonte and the story I am living through now. A story where an author finds herself trapped when her father-in-law gives her a tape, the contents of which force her into a terrifying and complicated position. I fire off my email and delete my Sent folder. The trail Deonte told me to lay is laid. Robert will not find it easy to make me disappear.
I retrieve the tape player from my gym bag, set up my iPhone beside it, and when it’s rewound, press play and start to record it on my iPhone. I leave the recording to do its thing while I head to the bedroom to arrange one last thing.
I don’t have a gun, and a knife is too premeditated a weapon to take. I need something that isn’t a weapon but can be used as one. On a shelf in the bedroom, I find what I’m looking for: the palm-sized glass paperweight I won as a secondary school prize for writing. A good-luck charm, a talisman. Inside its translucent heft is a smoky swirl of lilac, a ghost of a colour caught in tiny bubbles. This will do.
I know from hours of research that the weakest point of the skull is the pterion, the area just behind the temple. The bone is the thinnest here, where three sections of skull meet, and a solid blow can easily rupture the meningeal artery hidden just beneath. I remember, after I unearthed that horrifying little fact, I went straight out and bought myself a cycle helmet.
Back in the bedroom, I tuck the glass ball neatly inside a rolled-up pair of socks and bury it deep in my suitcase. It might not be a loaded gun, but it’s all I’ve got. I can explain away my paperweight as an old Christmas gift with sentimental value if ever questioned on it.
The rattle of keys in the apartment door snaps my eyes to the beside clock. It’s six o’clock and Edward’s home.
‘Harry?’
I close the lid on my case, flick the clasps and spin the combination lock, heaving it up to standing. Packed. Ready. ‘Just coming,’ I holler back. ‘One second.’
He’s in the kitchen with a smile on his face when I find him. He raises both hands, a bottle of Bollinger champagne in one, a gift bag in the other. His grin broadens and I know what it means.
‘It’s done. Signed,’ he cheers, pulling me in a tight bear hug.
‘Oh my God, Ed.’
‘Two point eight,’ Edward says meaningfully.
I stare at him for a moment, the number too abstract to grasp. ‘Two point eight?’ I ask.
His eyes have an almost electric charge. Billion; he means billion. My stomach clenches at a number that doesn’t sound quite right, quite healthy.
‘Two point eight billion,’ I mumble the words, their meaning gone. I set down the two glasses in my hands carefully. If there was ever a time to make an exception to my no drinking rule this might be the time.
Edward laughs but I do not. He carefully removes the foil on the bottle, twists the wires, and pops the cork. Foam rises.
The numbers terrify me. Like a sudden timer set on my life. Like a price on my head. The numbers are too high. Fate, karma – whatever – will not allow it.
I swallow hard and try to think of the right thing to say as he pours for us.
I try to focus on Edward, how happy he is. I try to remember who we are, who I am, why we are doing any of this. I close my eyes and bury my face in his chest. There he is – his smell, his touch, the sound of his heart. I breathe in the scent of the man I met at the Natural History Museum two years ago, the man I have laughed and cried with, who has been beside me ever since. I let my body relax into him.