Or maybe he was right, and we’d had all those things until we began to outgrow each other, or at least he began to outgrow me, but ending things the way he had wasn’t the way to go about it, not if you had a beating heart. After Drew left, I opened a bottle of gin someone had given me for Christmas and got stinking drunk, falling into bed at some point after midnight, still wearing my clothes and boots. I woke up the next morning with a sore head, a broken heart, and a stomach so hollow, I thought someone had actually scooped out all my insides while I was sleeping and left a gaping hole where my organs should be.
It took me a good long while to get back out there. I spent the first three months after Mum’s death and the breakup hibernating in the flat, ordering pizza, and consuming endless containers of ice cream. I stayed away from the gin, a fact on which I congratulated myself daily, but perhaps I should have forgone the pizza and the ice cream and drunk myself into oblivion instead. I missed my submission deadline, frustrated my agent beyond all endurance, and basically wallowed in self-pity. Once I realized I’d gained nearly two stone, the pizza orders and ice cream binges came to an abrupt halt, but it took another several months for me to start digging myself out of the hole I’d fallen headlong into.
I submitted my manuscript, started a diet, resumed my exercise routine, and created a profile on a dating app. The book was approved after two rounds of edits, and the pounds slowly came off, but no new partner materialized. The men I went out with fell into three distinct categories: blokes whose profile picture had been taken ten years and fifty pounds ago, who were recently divorced and wanted to autopsy the breakup and moan about their ex-wives; guys who were married but wanted a bit on the side; and men I would have liked to see again but who had no interest in me long-term, though they weren’t averse to hooking up. I felt like a car that someone was willing to test drive but not commit to purchasing because they thought they could find a better deal. Was it any wonder I was still single? At the rate I was going, I’d have to freeze my eggs if I ever hoped to have children. Not the best state of mind for writing, as my last offering, which Angela had refused to even show to my publisher, showed.
Perhaps my need to write something darker was a form of therapy, a way for me to exorcize my demons, but I wasn’t sure I wanted my main character to die by hanging. There were authors who could get away with killing off their characters and retain their fans, but I was a nonfiction writer trying to dip my toe into the vast ocean that was fiction. I couldn’t afford to take chances with my very first novel, which I had yet to start. I had spent a day and a half at the retreat and hadn’t written a word.
Letting myself off the hook just for tonight, I washed my face, brushed my teeth, changed into pajamas, and climbed into bed, my thoughts immediately turning to Alys. Who were you? I asked the darkness. What happened to you, and who hated you enough to want to see you hang?
A gust of wind buffeted the house, making me glance toward the mullioned window. The diamond-shaped panes were illuminated by hazy moonlight that cast my room in a silvery pall. I felt a cold caress on my skin as the bitter wind breached the ancient windowpanes. And then I heard it—the unmistakable sound of a tolling bell.
Chapter 14
Alys
The wedding was set for the end of July. The banns were called at St. Botolph’s for the first time on Sunday, and now there was no changing her mind, unless someone reported an impediment to the marriage before the wedding day.
Matthew and Ellie were to be married the week before, their banns called for the second time just before Alys and John’s. One more time and they would be free to marry in the sight of God. Alys hadn’t spoken to Matthew properly since Will and Bess’s wedding, avoiding him whenever she saw him in the village and sitting clear across from him at church. He could have approached her had he wished, but Matthew seemed disinclined to explain himself, and she had no right to ask anything of him. He’d made his choice, and so had she.
Still, Alys prayed every night as she lay on her cot that something would happen to stop or at least delay the wedding. She couldn’t make peace with what was to come, dreading the visits from her intended and Bess’s sly comments about what took place in a marriage bed. She didn’t need to be told; she had a fairly good idea. If she were supremely unlucky, she would get with child on her wedding
