Chapter 27
iris
Ashley Lincoln is talking.
She hasn’t said much yet, beyond asking for her mother, but she’s talking.
Which means it’s only a matter of time before she tells someone what happened that night. Before all of our secrets – not just mine – are blown wide open.
Mac and Amy’s.
Jesse’s.
And Finn’s.
I couldn’t protect my son when he was alive, but I’m not going to fail him now.
For the second night running, I pace the length of the kitchen at three in the morning, unable to sleep, weighing my options, my robe casting strange shadows on the moonlit limestone floor as it flares behind me.
I need a plan. Because if Ashley is talking, she’s awake. Awake, awake. And that means she might remember what happened that night. I can’t let her tell anyone. I can’t let her blow up my life. I can’t let her destroy what’s left of my family.
Ninety per cent of patients who are in a coma for a month or more don’t wake up at all; most of those who do are severely brain damaged.
Ashley’s chances of any meaningful recovery after being unconscious for so long have to be slim at best. It’s what the doctors have said; it’s what everyone thinks.
But I knew when I saw her in the hospital last week Ashley was going to defy the doctors’ ass-covering equivocations.
She was lying motionless in her bed, surrounded by a mass of medical equipment: machines and tubes, a cart of supplies, bags of liquids hanging from poles, boxes of wipes, gloves, straws, syringes.
Her once-pretty face was grey and swollen from the steroids, her eyes pressed into slits by her bloated flesh, her lips thick with petroleum jelly.
But she saw me. She saw me. She knew who I was. She didn’t move, or even try to speak. But her eyes grew darker, until they burned through me.
As I was leaving, I saw that journalist, Quinn Wilde, skulking at the end of the corridor, hunched in a wheelchair, trying to appear like she belonged in the hospital. Not a hard lift: she looks like she’s been chewed by a wood chipper and spat back out.
She must have been startlingly attractive once. In fact, against all logic, she still is, with that piercing blue eye and sweep of jet-black hair. There’s something about her: force of personality, charisma. “Rizz”, as Finn would say.
Would have said.
I suck a deep breath into lungs that have suddenly deflated.
Even now, more than a year after his death, I can still be surprised by the strength of my own grief.
It’s not the big things: the lost birthdays, the things he’ll never do or be, the wedding that’ll never happen, the grandchildren who won’t come into being.
It’s not even Christmas. It’s the small things, the everyday.
I’ve learned that when someone you love dies, you don’t lose them all at once, but in pieces, over a long time, the way the post stops coming.
There are times when I struggle to remember the sound of his voice, and other days I can hear him so clearly I spin round to find him.
And just when I think I’ve come to terms with my loss, that I’ve reached that stage of mourning they call acceptance, I discover another part of him that’s gone.
My son will die over and over again for the rest of my life.
Grief is forever. I will never stop grieving Finn, because I’ll never stop loving him. That’s just how it is.
I love you a tiny bit, Finn used to say.
A speck, I’d reply.
He’d grin. A molecule.
I look up through the kitchen skylight at a fat, orange moon hanging low overhead. I imagine Finn staring at the same moon from wherever, whenever, he is.
Finn would’ve liked Quinn Wilde. I thought that the first time I met her, in the immediate aftermath of the accident.
They were pulling my son’s grey body from the lake in the bitter light of dawn, and when she came to talk to me – and she was kind, a kindness I didn’t expect and that very nearly killed me – my first, irrational thought was, Finn would have liked you.
My son was the most popular boy at school, movie-star handsome, athletic, smart.
But there was another side to him, a side almost no one saw.
A quirky, rebellious side. He was more like his cousin Nicky than Amy ever realised, though without the angst. Finn saw humour in dark corners and delighted in the ridiculous.
He’d have hated the way he’s been beatified by this town.
My sister is the only one who understands the depth and breadth of my loss. Jesse is too corroded by guilt and anger to have space for grief; as he should be, because he’s the reason we’re all trapped in this hell. He sold his soul to Colt Smith, and our boys paid the price.
But Amy loved Finn as much as I do. If grief can be quantified, if it can be weighed and assessed and placed in a hierarchy, then Amy is suffering more than I am, because she lost Nicky and Finn; she lost two sons.
But my sister and I haven’t spoken for fifteen months.
Actions – choices – have consequences.
I stop pacing, and rest my hands on the thick Carrara marble countertop, my heart so heavy I can’t stand upright. I know what I have to do. I’m just not sure if I can bring myself to do it.
I thought I had more time. I never dreamed Ashley’s recovery – if it ever actually happened – would be this quick.
But I should have known when I saw her that the world I’ve carefully rebuilt for myself, for my family, was about to come crashing down.
If she speaks up, if Jesse ever finds out the truth about what we did, our lives will be over.
Perhaps literally.
I reach in the pocket of my night robe for my phone, and bring up a name.
My thumbs move quickly across the screen as I type, knowing that once I open this door, it will be impossible to close it.
In the corner of the moonlit kitchen, I catch Finn’s shadow. If I turn my head just so, I can see him smiling.