It wasn’t the way I wanted to go. Not the way I always thought I’d go.
If I imagined my death, I pictured a darkened room. Our bedroom. Pillows plumped behind my back; a glass of water touched to my lips once my own hands became too weak to hold it. Morphine to manage the pain. Visitors tiptoeing in single file to say their good-byes; you, red-eyed but stoic, absorbing their kind words.
And me, gradually more asleep than awake, until one morning I never woke up at all.
I used to joke that in my next life I wanted to come back as a dog.
Turns out you don’t get that much choice.
You take what you’re given, whether it suits you or not. A woman just like you. Older, uglier. That or nothing.
It feels strange to be without you.
Twenty-six years, we were together. Married for almost as long. For better or for worse. You in a suit, me in an empire-line dress picked to hide a five-month bump. A new life together.
And now it’s just me. Lonely. Scared. Out of my depth in the shadows of a life I once lived to the full.
Nothing worked out the way I thought it would.
And now this.
Suicide? Think again.
The message isn’t signed. Anna won’t know who it’s from.
But I do. I’ve spent the past year waiting for this to happen, fooling myself that silence meant safety.
It doesn’t.
I can see the hope on Anna’s face; the promise of answers to the questions that keep her awake at night. I know our daughter. She never would have believed that you and I would have stepped off that cliff of our own free will.
She was right.
I see, too, with painful clarity, what will happen now. Anna will go to the police. Demand an investigation. She’ll fight for the truth, not knowing that the truth hides nothing but more lies. More danger.
Think again.
What you don’t know can’t hurt you. I have to stop Anna going to the police. I have to stop her finding out the truth about what happened, before she gets hurt.
I thought I’d seen the last of my old life the day I drove to Beachy Head, but I guess I was wrong.
I have to stop this.
I have to go back down.