Chapter 2
Felix closed the door behind him and let out a long breath.
He’d known how lucky he was to find this place, one of six purpose-built apartments, or ‘flats’ as his sister insisted on calling them; teasing him as she always did for becoming so Americanised during his time in San Francisco.
Whatever Eden wanted to call it, his new home was just what he’d hoped for when moving back to the UK.
The big windows meant that it was full of light, even on the dullest of days, and Felix had a good-sized balcony with a view of the sea.
There was even a shared garden, which had a gate on one side leading to a footpath that went all the way to the beach.
He’d wanted a dog for as long as he could remember, but his apartment in San Francisco hadn’t been pet friendly in the slightest and then there’d been Meredith.
He’d wondered for a while if getting a dog might help, give her something to focus on other than the demons that had so often felt as if they were on the verge of overwhelming her.
The way things had become, in the end, he couldn’t have trusted her to look after herself – let alone a dog – she might even have sold it when he was at work one day.
Anything was possible when she needed to score her next hit.
Now he could get a dog if he wanted one and come home from work knowing that it had been looked after by whatever doggy-daycare service he booked it into.
There were no more calls from Meredith at all hours of the day and night, telling him she was in trouble and needed his help.
The only person he had to look after was himself and it was a huge relief not to be responsible for anyone or anything else.
It was weird, though, the way the human psyche worked, because he also felt strangely bereft, as though something was missing.
He didn’t want to go back to that life, but the void that trying to help Meredith had left behind was what had led him to volunteer for Domusamare, a local charity.
It had been set up initially to try to combat homelessness, but now the charity also supported addicts, recovering addicts and victims of domestic abuse.
His first day volunteering there had taken him back to some of his darkest days in San Francisco, trying to help fentanyl addicts, most of whom had long ago lost the desire to try and help themselves.
A colleague at the hospital where he’d worked in San Francisco had asked if he would help out and, as an occupational therapist, he’d truly believed he had some skills that could be useful to people whose long-term use of the drug had resulted in a huge physical toll on their bodies, as well as their minds.
The clinic Felix volunteered at, By the Bay Recovery, was where he had met Meredith.
A former addict herself, but five years clean, she’d retrained as a therapist to help others as a way of giving back to those who had saved her.
It had been incredibly easy to fall in love with her and he had barely given her past a thought when their relationship had moved from friendship to something he’d hope would last forever.
Felix had always known that alcoholics and drug addicts were in recovery for life, but at first he’d felt sure that Meredith had banished her demons.
He could never have guessed the day he met her, or in the months that followed as their relationship deepened, that she was constantly teetering frighteningly close to a relapse.
Meredith seemed to have it all together and she ran five miles every day, saying it kept her mind and body in the kind of condition she owed them, after all the abuse she’d put them through.
It wasn’t just a routine, it was essential to her wellbeing and, looking back, maybe that had also been an addiction of sorts.
Felix just didn’t realise because all he could see was the woman he loved.
He’d felt guilty ever since for not seeing the signs in her when he should have been able to.
Growing up with an alcoholic mother who hadn’t managed to break the cycle until he was an adult, Felix knew that sobriety often balanced on a knife edge.
His mother had tried numerous times in the past and had ‘fallen off the wagon’, and even when she did manage to quit drinking there was always a fear in the back of his mind that at any moment she could start again.
All of that made it even harder to forgive himself for not truly considering that possibility when it came to the woman he’d shared his life and home with.
Meredith was almost the quintessential Californian girl when it came to her appearance, long blonde hair, bluey grey eyes that looked like they’d been colour matched to the water in San Francisco Bay and a broad, bright smile that made it look for all the world as though she’d never encountered a major problem in her life.
And the truth was, by some standards, she hadn’t.
Instead Meredith had a pre-disposition to poor mental health, where even minor knocks and blows could feel catastrophic and leave her desperate to numb her resulting anxiety.
It had started off with alcohol when she was still at school and progressed through an addiction to prescriptions painkillers after a minor accident, and eventually on to Class A drugs, until she was no longer functioning at all.
That seemed to be far behind her by the time they met, but then she’d lost a client she’d grown close to, and all the years of therapy and studying, and helping others overcome their own demons, just melted away.
Meredith had spiralled back into addiction in a way that had been terrifyingly quick and nothing that Felix had tried had been able to pull her out again.
She’d left the home they shared, telling him he didn’t understand her and that he never would because he hadn’t had to fight his own addiction.
He’d been desperate to get Meredith the support she needed to get well again.
At first, she’d rung him at all hours of the day and night asking for help, mainly in the form of money she claimed she needed for food, but they both knew she didn’t care whether she ate or not.
All she cared about was the next hit. Then she disappeared altogether.
Someone had told Felix they’d heard she’d gone back into rehab, but she’d stopped calling him, or even picking up when he tried to get hold of her and he’d discovered that she’d racked up thousands of dollars’ worth of debt on credit cards she’d taken out in his name.
Felix had done everything he could to track her down, working with her family to try and save the woman they all loved, and in the end, it had pushed him to the edge of his own limits and he’d been forced to make the decision to leave San Francisco, to give himself some peace of mind.
His friend, Karl, still worked at the clinic, and Felix had asked him to keep trying to find Meredith and to let him know if she turned up, because if there was anything he could do to help her, he wouldn’t hesitate.
The love he’d felt for Meredith was still there, but it had morphed from romantic love to a kind of compassionate sorrow.
He really hoped she was getting the help she needed and that this time it might actually work, but coming home to Cornwall had saved him from living half a life, constantly on edge.
He’d taken a job as an occupational therapist at St Piran’s Hospital.
It was a world away from his life in California and, even though addiction problems existed everywhere, the rugged beauty of the coastline in the area where he’d grown up, had soothed his soul from the moment he got back.
Most of his patients were rehabilitating from injuries, or strokes, and he felt as though he could really help them make meaningful steps towards recovery, or at least find new ways to function that would improve their quality of life.
Yet as the weeks ticked by, the void had opened up inside him and the desire to do more to help people like Meredith had grown with it.
She haunted his dreams and when Drew, his sister’s boyfriend, had told him about his own volunteering at Domusamare, it had felt like the outlet he needed.
That had proved to be true, but he’d almost forgotten there’d be days like this.
Days when it hit home that sometimes there was nothing that could be done to change the outcome everyone was working so desperately hard to try and avoid.
Days when he’d be reminded so sharply of Meredith that it would feel almost impossible to breathe.
* * *
Knock… Knock-knock-knock… Knock. It was almost like Morse code, the way his sister knocked on the door, announcing who it was without her having to say a word.
It was a code they’d come up with as kids, when their rooms had been their sanctuaries and they didn’t want to let anyone in, except one another.
Their mother had been in the grip of alcoholism back them, but their father had made his own mistakes, enabling his wife and trying to cover up what was going on.
Even when Felix had told his dad that he and Eden felt unsafe when their mother was on one of her drunken rampages, he hadn’t forced her to get help.
Instead of making his wife face the consequences of her actions, he’d fitted locks to both of his children’s bedroom doors, so that they could ‘feel safe’ by locking their mother out.
That wasn’t the way to make children feel safe, but it had at least provided a physical barrier to keep both of their parents away from them.
They started using their keys to lock the doors when they went out, too, after their mother had got horribly drunk one day and ripped all the posters off Eden’s walls and torn them to shreds in a fit of rage.