Hedy clattered down the cliff stairs. She could barely see. The light felt as though it were changing before her eyes. But maybe that was just pure anger. They’d destroyed her creation. Vandalised it and trampled through the tiny half-lost hope she’d had of understanding this place and what it had done to her mother. It had always been a mad project. She’d known that. She wasn’t stupid. She understood that growing an amateur earth-garden next to a ruined tower on top of a cliff in New Zealand was not a research paper. She understood that the open wound of her mother’s vanishing had grown inside over the years and driven her and tormented her and shaped her like a strand of mucus wrapped around a sapling.
But she’d tried. When a different possibility had opened itself, rather than just therapy or medication or just buying lots of shit or the other palliatives that old world society seemed to offer, she’d taken it. She’d tried.
Her Mum had always said that trying and having a good heart was the secret of life.
But life is full of people, and people are so cruel.
The wind shook the cliff stairs. Bolts strained. Hedy nearly tripped on the bottom, right on the sand, but steadied herself. It seemed as though she could feel rather than see a burning trail heading inland, past the beach cottages and the houses, threading its way north. The trail of where they’d taken the dismembered bits of her soul. She followed, her internal weather rising to match the storm.