Chapter Eight

I stare in the mirror. I don’t recognise the woman staring back at me. She isn’t grey and weighed down. She’s flushed and her breath is coming in short pants. She looks alive. I know I can’t walk back into the other room and grab this chance with both hands, but she looks as if she could. She looks like a woman who knows how to take a leap of faith.

I try to smile at her, to ask her what she’s going to do, but the image shifts and flickers. She’s still there, but now there is someone else there too, like a ghostly shadow.

It’s the woman with the hollow eyes. Her face gets clearer the more I look, swallowing up the other me, absorbing her. I want to shout out to call her back, but I know my voice will carry to the living room.

Now Hollow Eyes is all that is left. She looks back at me sadly. Knowingly.

I brace my hands on the sink and drop my head. I can’t bear to look at her any more. Her work is done, anyway. She’s woken me up from this temporary insanity. Truth has come rushing back into my evening like a cold draught.

I could sleep with Cristian tonight, but it wouldn’t change anything. It wouldn’t make me free. The ghosts are still here to haunt me. My friend in the mirror is proof of that. Tomorrow I would feel cheap and dirty. Instead of remembering this wonderful short time together, I would want to pretend it had never happened.

And Cristian is not a faceless man fit only for a meaningless fling. He’s right—I do know him. In a way I can’t articulate and don’t understand. How can I use him like that after all he’s given me? It would make me no better than Gareth.

I turn and rest my bottom on the sink, stare at the tiles on the wall. They blur and swim into a sea of white.

I don’t want to forget Cristian. No matter how great the pleasure could be in this moment, I don’t want to rob myself of those future memories. I want to treasure the moments—my first tango, the way he looked at me…as if I was special, as if I was worth something. I need these things to hang onto if I’m ever going to banish that sad grey creature who looks back at me in the mirror.

I take in a breath, stand up and walk towards the door.