9 #2
The ignition light flares on. The wipers drag hard across the glass and the engine rumbles as I pull away from the kerb, leaving the post office behind in a blurred streak of red.
I check the mirror twice before the car reaches the end of the street.
No grey car ahead of me. No car following behind me.
My hands strangle the wheel as Conall’s warning keeps ricocheting between my temples, knocking against the part of me that is still, stupidly, glad.
The trial is happening.
I can already see Elias somewhere beyond Stonebrook, beneath a bright sky, all that violence softened by snow. I see him chopping wood outside some impossibly beautiful little cabin.
I hang on to that image like a drowning woman as the anxiety bleeds out of me in small drops.
The road narrows ahead. A sign for the cemetery leans out of the rain, its white arrow pointing right. Then it suddenly flares.
Headlights bloom in the rear-view mirror next.
My eyes flick up, struggling against the reflection.
A car comes around the bend behind me, too fast for the wet road. When the battered grey bonnet cuts through the curtain of rain… my breath stops.
The engine behind me revs low and the car surges closer until its headlights fill my mirror entirely. The light floods the inside of my car and turns the envelope beside me bone-white against the dim surroundings.
My heart breaks into a gallop so hard it seems to move the steering wheel beneath my hands all on its own.
‘No,’ I whimper, but the word is swallowed by the rain and the rising growl of the engine behind me.
The road kinks sharply ahead. The car behind me surges once and clips my rear bumper with a dull, warning thud. The jolt snaps me against the seat belt, the wheel jerking beneath my palms, tyres hissing over the wet edge of the lane as the car lurches towards the verge.
Mud spits up against the side panel.
My insides fall through so violently, bile burns the back of my throat.
I stamp on the brake and scream as the car screeches to a halt, half on the road, half sunk into the muddy verge.
Behind me, the grey car slows.
And my soul leaves me.
But it doesn’t stop. Just moves slowly enough for me to feel them there.
My lungs lock as it crawls past, engine rumbling low, windows black beneath rain and shadow.
I don’t see their faces. I don’t need to. Don’t want to.
The message sits in the growing gap between us.
And finally, the car accelerates. Its rear lights bleed red through the downpour before it takes the next bend and disappears.
I’m gripping the steering wheel so hard the ache in my joints startles me to the now.
I sit there with nature screaming at me from beyond the windscreen, the wipers swatting away the warnings I’ve been ignoring until now.
The road ahead is empty as if nothing has happened at all.
As if I imagined it.
As if my car isn’t skewed towards the edge of the road, mud coating the side, and my pulse scattered all over the wet lane.
My phone lies face down in the footwell where it had fallen when I hit the brakes.
For a wild moment, I think about reaching for it, calling Conall back and telling him they weren’t gone – that they’d followed me after all.
But that’s just it.
Am I forever going to be expecting other people to solve my problems?
Not just that – if I call Conall, this stays connected to Elias. Calling means surrendering it to questions, police, someone else.
But even saying it aloud in the confines of my car makes it too real. Painful, almost.
My breath breaks, but it doesn’t form a scream yet. It’s just a small sound that crawls out of me and turns into another, and another. Until I’m bent over the steering wheel with my forehead pressed to my knuckles, crying so hard my ribs ache.
And not just from those brutes scaring me.
But because Elias told me to stay away, and I heard rejection instead of warning.
Because Conall told me to leave, and I treated it like another person deciding how my life is going to go.
Because Ron turned his back on me.
Because I have a big house with nothing in it.
Because I am… empty.
And because when a door won’t open for me, I start believing the problem must be in me.
I had clung to Elias, made him into something I could save when I couldn’t do the same for myself.
Something I could keep inside photographs.
A man with winter in his eyes and grief on his lips.
A man who read my quotations and wrote back in beautiful cursive as if beauty and danger could not only coexist in the same body but make each other more irresistible.
But his past was not beautiful.
It was not a wound waiting for my hands to stitch it up.
It was a dark room full of those who wanted to keep it dark. Men who knew my car. My face.
I cry until my throat burns and the steering wheel is wet beneath me.
Until I fill that emptiness in my chest with pain I’ve been holding back, and cold certainty takes its place – certainty that this thing between Elias Crane and me has already ended, and I am the only one standing in the ruins, refusing to see the smoke.
Eventually, my sobs thin into jagged breaths.
I glance at the envelope on the passenger seat.
Norway.
The future I keep postponing. The envelope I have kept sealed while I waited for one more letter. Then one more day. One more reason not to leave.
My fingers shake when I pick it up. Without realising, my arms curl around it and crush it against my chest.
Because I’m terrified.
Of Elias. Of leaving. Of staying. Of finding out that the thing I mistook for connection was only another way of poisoning myself.
I ease my foot off the brake and give the steering wheel an experimental turn. The steering answers.
Swallowing hard, I glance at the address one last time.
A beat.
A sob.
Car back into gear. My foot finds the accelerator. I turn around.
The road back to the post office seems longer. The curtain of rain thins to mist. Every headlight makes my body flinch.
By the time I pull up across from the red postbox again, my hands are numb.
The street is emptier after the downpour, washed clean in that cruel way rain does with everything. As if it can rinse away the proof and leave you alone with the meaning. And it somehow feels as if it’s only waiting for my footsteps to punctuate the change in the world order.
I get out before I dare change my mind; before something else spooks me back into my dark little cocoon I’ve built out of lies and pretences.
My shoes splash through the shallow gutter. My breath leaves me in broken clouds.
At the box, I stop. The image of Elias chained to the table tears through me; glacial eyes fixed on mine, his fingers wrapped around my hand, his lips—
His lips…
His hands.
His voice.
My lip quivers.
No, I think, enough of that.
I push the envelope through the slot.
It drops with a soft, final thud as I turn my back to it.
And this time, I don’t look back.