Maggie arrives home, barely able to remember any of her journey from the clinic. Coming back to a cold, empty flat after news like this is far from ideal, but she doesn’t have anyone she can call. At times like these she wishes she had some sort of pet for company; she has always preferred animals to people, animals know what they are. She feels smaller than she did before. As though having the fragility of life thrown at her this way has made her shrink a little.
She’s hungry, but she can’t eat, not now. She suspects that knowing the end is coming is worse than the end itself. Her parents didn’t know when their time was up, and she wonders what they might have done differently if they had. The answer is one word, and she believes it to be true: everything. When things don’t look right, sometimes you just have to change your perspective, she thinks to herself, then reaches a more positive conclusion:
This death sentence is an opportunity to fix things before it’s too late.
She decides to eat after all, knowing she’ll need her strength to make this work. The fridge is practically bare, so she makes beans on toast. “Nothing wrong with that, packed with protein,” she mutters to herself, while stirring the orange contents of the saucepan.
Once she has eaten, she lights the fire. It will help to warm the place up, and she should probably start burning all the things she doesn’t want anyone else to find when she is gone. In her hurry, she forgets to put on any gloves before picking up a piece of wood and gets a splinter in her finger. She tries to get it out with a pair of tweezers, but it snaps in half, leaving most of the fragment still buried beneath her skin. She ignores the pain and strikes a match, lighting a small bundle of newspaper and kindling, watching the worthless words written on the paper smolder and burn. She unexpectedly finds herself smiling. Life might have moved the goalposts when she wasn’t looking, but she’s confident that if she adjusts the plan and her aim just a little, she can still win the game.
Maggie has some regrets, but doesn’t want to share them, not even with herself. When you’ve spent your whole life living a lie, it can feel a little late to start telling the truth. She checks her emails, then checks Aimee’s; she knows all her passwords. She can also see exactly where she is, thanks to the phone tracker app she installed on Aimee’s mobile. She just knew that Aimee and Jack Anderson were having an affair. She imagines him fucking her right now and squeezes her eyes shut to try to delete the image. Slut. Maggie has tipped off a journalist and is pleased to see that the story has already been published online. Jennifer Jones has come in very handy indeed so far.
Maggie closes her laptop and sits quietly in front of the crackling fire, trying to silence the thoughts that seem so loud and profound to her now. Perhaps it’s the clarity of knowing that her journey is coming to an end. She looks around the room and concludes that her life hasn’t amounted to much. Her eyes come to rest on the pile of unopened mail sitting on the coffee table: white paper rectangles, with tiny plastic windows revealing her name.
Maggie O’Neil.
Except it isn’t really hers.
Knowing a person’s name is not the same as knowing a person.
She’s used that name for so long now, sometimes she forgets it was secondhand, borrowed, stolen. She wonders if perhaps Aimee feels the same way too. Maggie stares into the flames and starts to think she has more in common with other people than she previously believed. We are born alone and we die alone, and we’re all a little bit afraid of being forgotten.
Maggie wasn’t always Maggie.
Maggie was just who she became in order to hide.
You can’t find a butterfly if you’re only looking for a caterpillar.
As soon as she is reunited with Aimee, Maggie will go back to being who she was before.