May 6, England
THE FUCK-YOU LEATHER jacket is back.
Earlier this week, Erin was promoted from fashion assistant to fashion editor, and now she has an intern of her own to bring her Starbucks every morning.
Since we moved into a small quayside flat together, our relationship has gone from friendship to almost-sisterhood. We share victories and losses, pizza and movies, laughter and tears, sarcasm and gossip. We share it all.
I can’t help but think she’s becoming a mini-Lowe, and strangely that isn’t the insult I once imagined it to be. Lowe is a force, yes, and a terrifying one at that. But she’s also fiercely independent, passionate about her career, loving and maternal when the occasion calls for it, and she doesn’t take shit from anyone. Erin could find worse role models.
I don’t tell Erin that, of course. I simply say, “Check you out, you superstar. You’re going to be the next Anna Wintour.”
She laughs her sailor laugh, lips once again painted siren red, and replies, “I don’t want to be the next Anna Wintour. I want to be the original Erin Baxter.”
God help anyone who stands in her way.
Tonight, we’re meeting for celebratory Friday night cocktails, and the iconic leather jacket is making a comeback. She broke up with Smith as soon as we got back to England, and I can’t say I was too devastated. He’s a selfish stalker, a closet misogynist, and he didn’t deserve her for a second. Like I say, I can’t say I was too devastated. Nor was she.
Her dad got out of jail a few weeks after we got home. Moved into a council flat across the River Tyne. Karen, Erin and Annabel will never forget what he did to them, never forgive the damage he caused, but they’re supportive of his rehabilitation. Karen filed for divorce, but she’s helping him find work, making sure he has the care he needs for his Aubin’s. Not out of obligation, but because she’s allowing her daughters to make their own decisions on whether or not they want him in their lives. And if they decide on the former, she wants him to be more than an empty shell. For them.
She’ll always love the man he once was, but she’ll never be able to forgive the man he became.
Kasun’s trial is now under way with more charges listed than I can even remember. And last week, it was leaked that he accidentally implicated Tim Halsey in the murder of Brodie Breckenridge, a young reporter who figured out exactly where Bastixair’s funds were coming from. Kasun paid him to quiet her forever. I shudder when I think of the gelato we shared in Danube Park, back when I was convinced Erin was the victim of a Liam Neeson movie plot, not the man sitting next to me on the bench.
Erin has come a long way in six months. Her emotional recovery has been tumultuous, and she’s been seeking treatment for PTSD—and, with typical Erin panache, completely bossing it. She’s not hiding from the psychological aftereffects of three weeks in hell. She’s staring them in the face and saying, “I see you, and I respect you, but I will not let you define me.”
The way she’s dealing with her mental health—ferociously, openly, without fear of discussing it—is a constant source of inspiration for me. I’m still taking my meds, albeit a lower dose, and I still have my moments. But they’re few and far between, compared to how regularly I used to succumb to the savage panic attacks and long stretches of depression. What helps more than anything is having someone to talk to about it—not a medical professional, but someone who really cares, who’ll always be there. Someone who’ll listen to me talk about my dad without filing the gaps with empty condolences and pointless platitudes. She just . . . listens. She’s just there.
It’s sad that I don’t have that in my mum, but she’s fighting her own battles.
I did eventually write my piece on Serbia, although it took a slightly different angle than my original draft back in that Serbian hotel room. Less history, less travel and quite a lot more focus on the way an innocent press trip to a celebrated music festival escalated into the holiday from hell—and ended in a warehouse shoot-out and the ultimate exposure of a national scandal that’s gone unnoticed for decades.
My first-person account of the entire experience sold to a national newspaper. Enough to land me a second-chance interview at the Daily Standard.
This time, I nailed it. I’ve been a junior crime reporter for six months, and I’m loving every minute.
Every single day, I think of what Erin said to me in that hospital room in Serbia, both of us hurting, both of us unsure whether we were going to survive the next few minutes:
“Aren’t you scared? Doesn’t every single man in this world scare you? What they can do . . . what they can take from you. Don’t you carry that fear with you everywhere you go? We’re so much smaller than them, so much weaker. Once they decide to do something, most of us don’t have a hope in hell of stopping it from happening.”
The whole world is our dark alley at midnight.
We are all hunted by something, or by someone. We are all prey. But that doesn’t mean we can’t fight back.