Page 157 of Pull Me Under

‘Just here’s fine,’ I say.

He pulls over. I climb out into the night air. Cold. Salt-sharp. The smell of the sea underneath everything, the way it always is here.

The taxi pulls away. Red lights disappearing around the bend.

I’m alone.

The cottage sits dark at the end of the path. I didn’t leave any lights on when I left the house this morning.

His holdall is still in the bedroom. His toothbrush next to mine. His jumper draped over the chair where he left it this morning, a lifetime ago.

I stand in the hallway, lights off, breathing in the smell of old wood and salty air and, underneath it, him.

The cottage is still rough. The cooker works now, the roof doesn’t leak anymore, Dot’s bed is solid enough, if lumpy with springs. But it’s still a long way from finished. Walls that need replastering. A kitchen that belongs in the last century. Windows that let in the drafts.

But that’s not what’s making it feel empty.

I sink onto the sofa. The cushions smell like him. Everything smells like him.

It’s probably in my head. It’s got to be in my head, right? I don’t do this. Feelings. Messy. Heartache.

The tears come then. Quietly at first, then harder, until I’m curled on my side with my face pressed into the cushion that still holds the shape of his body.

I fucking hate crying.

Crying is for wimps.

I can’t stop it all the same.

I did this.

Whatever happens next, I did this.

I don’t know how long I lie there.

Long enough for the tears to stop. Long enough for the cold to seep through my clothes, through my skin, settling into my bones. Long enough for the silence to become unbearable.

I sit up. Wipe my face with the back of my hand. My eyes feel swollen, my throat raw.

The box is still in the corner. Helen’s letters. My father’s silence, preserved in yellowed envelopes.

I should leave them alone. I’ve already read them – already know what they say, what they mean, what they’ve cost.

But I’m pulling myself off the sofa anyway. Crossing the room. Sinking to my knees beside the box like it’s an altar.

The second letter. The one from 2020. I find it, unfold it, read it again by the light of my phone.

Jude and I share a sister? It seems ridiculous. Impossible. The thought still makes my head spin. All those years – all those fractured, lonely years – and somewhere in Bristol there was a girl who belonged to both of us. Who grew up without knowing any of us existed.

She wants to know about her brothers. About you. About why she’s grown up without any of you in her life.

Her brothers. Kit and Jude. Who don’t know she exists.

I trace Helen’s handwriting with my fingertip. The loops and curves of a woman I only remember from shadowy childhood recollections, writing to a man who never wrote back.

My father never saw this letter. It must have arrived years after we’d left, slipped through the letterbox of an empty cottage because where else would Helen send it? This was the only address she’d have known. And it sat here, behind the door with the junk mail and the council tax reminders, while Dad drank himself to death in Plymouth thinking she’d forgotten him.

He never knew she was forced out.