Chapter 3
Dorothea
A Month Before
Dorothea had been expecting this visit.
Every morning she got up, made herself a cup of tea and then sat in her favourite wing-backed chair in her studio, which had the best views of her garden and wood.
In winter, a wraithlike mist clung to the branches and obscured the tops of the trees, and, as she sat there watching in anticipation, she imagined him emerging through the woods like the apparition, the ghost, that he was.
Haunting her. Taunting her. Was she scared?
She didn’t like to admit to any kind of vulnerability: she was proud she’d carried on living alone in the villa, long after her friends told her she should downsize, even as her body began to decay.
She made sure to keep fit and dexterous with her art and her hiking, but there was no slowing down the hands of time that were ticking too quickly for her liking.
The final sculpture was her insurance. Her secrets set in papier-maché. Other people’s secrets too. This last collection had featured some of her best work. It was the sequence of her life – yet without the last sculpture it was a sentence without a full stop, a story without an ending.
But there was an ending, of course. There was always an ending if you waited long enough.
Solly started whining by her side, his ears pricked forwards, his nose pressed to the studio’s sliding doors, leaving a mark on the glass.
‘Can you sense it?’ she whispered, placing a hand on her dog’s large head.
Solly answered by whining some more, high-pitched and chilling.
Her eyes were trained on the area of garden where lawn met bracken, until she was certain that she too could see him materializing from between the trees, as though he’d been living in the woods all these years.
‘He’s coming for me,’ she said to Solly. ‘He’s finally coming for me.’