It happens like a switch being thrown.
One minute I am stumbling through the trees with my breath being torn from my throat and my heart thudding in my ears like the bass from the house music we used to listen to at university a lifetime ago, and then I emerge on to the lawn and the lake is there, stretching away from me, flat and still, like a watery blanket I could wrap myself up in and, instantly, I am calm.
It’s the strangest thing. All the stress of the last few weeks and months; the nights I’d lie in bed unable to sleep while Steffie’s features painted themselves across my eyelids; the mornings I’d look at Danny’s face on the pillow next to me and see a stranger lying there; those strange dreamlike months of the pregnancy-that-wasn’t where I floated around as if on a cloud, ignoring the tiny worm of anxiety that was steadily eating its way through my gut. The cold-sweat agony of ending up in here and having to face up to what I’d done, the lies I’d told, the lies I’d allowed myself to believe. Losing Sofia, then Charlie. Bish bosh. All of that drains from me as I gaze out across the expanse of water.
In its place, I am filled with a warm rush of wellbeing. It is as if all my life – the good, the bad, the heartwarming and heartbreaking – has been leading up to this one point. And here, by this lake, is exactly where I am supposed to be.
‘Hannah!’
Someone is calling my name from a distance, and I peer out across the lake and suddenly, incredibly, Charlie is there, her dark head bobbing about in the middle of the water.
‘Charlie?’
She waves.
‘Come in. It’s gorgeous. Sofia is here.’
I see now that there’s another head just behind Charlie’s, another hand waving.
I take five steps forward until I am on the very edge of the bank, where it tips down steeply. If I look ahead, the water looks black but, straight down below me, I can see dark fingers of weeds under the surface, waving at me through the murk.
‘Hannah!’ Charlie calls again. ‘Stop being such a wuss and get in here.’
I look across to the middle of the lake, where she is splashing about with Sofia in their little pool of sunshine, and smile, and it feels like the first time I have smiled in months. And I feel a warmth spreading through me as if the smile has unblocked something that has been blocked for a long time.
‘Coming,’ I say.
And I jump.