The white wine in my glass is tepid now. Almost undrinkable. I’ve been nursing it for the last forty-five minutes, too distracted by my thoughts to bring it to my mouth and sip from it. Added to that, I feel sick. Deep in my stomach there’s gnawing nausea that just won’t go away. I don’t want to eat or drink.
I wish I could sleep, but even that seems to be eluding me at the moment. I’ve been half watching something on the TV. Some reality show about properties being fixed up for half of nothing and transformed from perfectly lovely homes to functional spaces with cool, clinical lines. Where so much as a stray cup would have the place looking completely disordered.
A sandal-wearing male designer is waffling on about natural light and feng shui, and all I can think is that he has little to be worrying about. If I had any strength left in my body at all, I would lift the remote and switch the TV off, or, better still, hurl it at the TV.
The anger from earlier has left me drained. Exhausted. Pinned to the sofa with grief.
Stella sits down beside me, lifts up my legs and places them across her lap before repositioning the throw over them. She looks tired. Older. We’re all a bit broken by the last week or so.
‘How are you?’ she asks.
I know she expects an answer – a proper answer and not just a shrug of the shoulders, which I’m not sure I’ve the energy to deliver anyway.
‘Tired,’ I say, setting my wine glass on the floor. I know I won’t drink any more from it.
‘Today was rough,’ she says.
‘It was.’
Stella sighs, strokes my lower leg with her hand. ‘Things with you and Heidi. Have they always been this bad?’
‘Perhaps not this bad – but nobody had been murdered before,’ I say.
I know I’m being glib. I see Stella flinch at my words and I don’t want her to think badly of me. Or worse of me.
‘Yes, they have always been bad. Always. It didn’t start well. I was angry with her, and her mother, over Dad leaving. I felt he chose them over me and I hated them for it.’ I stop, take a deep breath and look back up her. ‘I know that sounds pathetic now, as a grown woman. But I was young then and he was my daddy. I never thought he would leave, but he did. And even when Natalie died, when I thought he might come back to us, he chose to stay on. He chose her over me, and I don’t think I’ve ever forgiven them for that.’
There’s a tightness in my chest.
‘It was a long time ago,’ Stella says softly.
‘It was. And I know that the adult me should be able to rationalise it all. Adult me does, to an extent, but there’s still this child in me who is so hurt by it all. And I’ve not always done the right thing, Stella. I’ve done bad things, you know. Things I’m not proud of. I can feel myself slipping back into those bad behaviours and it scares me. I should be better than this.’
Damn it, I feel the tightness in my chest rise up. A tingle in my nose, stinging in my eyes. I feel as if the floodgates, while not exactly opening, are about to crack a little.
‘We’ve all done the wrong thing when we’re hurting. Good people can do bad things for good reasons. And you’re a good person. I know that more than anything,’ Stella says, picking at invisible lint on the throw and looking downwards while she talks.
I shake my head. ‘I’m not sure I am,’ I say. ‘I’ve been so vindictive towards Heidi.’ My face blazes.
‘It’s understandable. She was your competition in a lot of ways. But it certainly doesn’t seem that she was fond of your father, either.’
‘That’s what angered me most when he left – you know, back then. That she seemed to hate him so much when I would’ve given anything to have him back. It was easier to hate her than hate him, I suppose. I didn’t want to see him as the enemy.’
‘But that changed?’ Stella says, probing gently. Her voice is calm and soft.
A tear falls and I wipe it away hastily, even though my arms are limp with exhaustion. I nod, just as I can feel my heart rate start to rise.
‘What happened to change it?’
I close my eyes. Images, snapshots of a time long gone flicker in my mind. Things I wasn’t sure for a long time were real. Things maybe I’m still not sure are real but I feel they are. Somewhere inside me I know they are. He called it love, but it wasn’t love, after all. It was never love. I’m scared to say the words. Afraid of judgement, even though I know that it wasn’t me, you see. I was never, ever the one at fault. I was a child.
I was only a child.
That bastard.
I was only a child, and he took so much from me and tried to convince me it was because he loved me just so very much. And then, despite all that ‘love’ he said he felt for me, and only me, he left. Shame washes over me. The shame borne out of all those confused, fucked-up feelings I experienced. The loyalty I showed him. How I begged him, this monster, to come back.
In a voice as small as I feel in that moment, my face blazing with shame, my voice choked with emotion and my stomach churning, the small sips of tepid wine threatening to rise from my stomach and splatter the floor, I speak. I close my eyes and say the words I’ve not said to a single person before.
‘When I remembered what he did to me.’