‘I just don’t know how…’ She steadied herself. ‘I don’t understand how she could have done that to me.’
Rachel’s pain was physical. It was contagious. I felt it transferring from her, down my arms and into my chest, into my body, my head. We kept to whispers – I didn’t want Mum and Auntie Sue to have to confront this ugly truth until I’d had a chance to prepare them.
‘I’m so sorry,’ I said, between sobs. It was all I had. Amy wasn’t there to explain herself.
‘I’ve lost my best friend, and now I’ve lost my husband. What did I do to deserve this?’ Rachel fell forward onto me, resting her cheek on my shoulder.
‘Hey, hey…’ I made soothing sounds, stroking a hand on her back. ‘Whatever she did, whatever terrible mistake Amy made, I know that she loved you.’
‘I thought she and I were like family…’ She blew her nose.
‘You are family,’ I squeezed her hand. ‘You were like a sister to Amy and you’re the auntie to her kids. You’re like another daughter to my mum…’ I wiped away a tear. ‘None of that is changing. We’ll get through this together, I promise.’
She folded me into a tight hug and we stood like that, holding each other, making one another solid.
Chapter Sixteen
I took the sofa again. Rachel had offered to share the queen-sized bed in the guest room, but I was afraid of disturbing her privacy – she really looked like she needed a good night’s sleep. I lay awake for hours, tossing and turning, trying to quieten my mind. It was impossible to switch off, and the harder I tried not to think about everything, the louder the thoughts became.
I was woken early by the sound of a magpie chattering in the garden. Already, my head was swimming, making it impossible to fall back to sleep. Just when the magpie finally stopped, I heard footsteps on the stairs.
‘Are you awake?’ Mum peeked her head into the living room.
‘Yeah, I suppose.’
I shuffled up on the sofa, making room for her to sit beside me. She rested her hand on my leg.
‘I knew you were awake in here,’ she said. ‘I could feel you, from upstairs. All that worry and pain you’re carrying.’
I rolled my eyes. My mum, the mystic.
‘I know you don’t believe me, but I can help you to heal.’
I scoffed. ‘What, like you healed yourself after Dad died?’
She shuffled uneasily on the sofa. ‘Well, yes… like I healed myself.’ She hesitated. ‘It took me a long time, admittedly… It was a process…’ Mum nodded to herself, agreeing with the words she had selected.
‘A process that took a year and a half, and that you abandoned your kids for?’ They were words I’d spat at her many times before, during the blazing rows that had erupted whenever we had tried to rebuild our relationship, but this time I was controlled. Calm.
‘Izzy, I have apologised a thousand times, and I’ll be sorry until my last breath for what it did to you—’
‘What you did to us,’ I corrected her.
‘What I did.’ She nodded. ‘The hurt I caused. But I had to, love. I wouldn’t be here today if I hadn’t gone then.’
She leaned in closer and put her hand up to my face. Her palm was warm on my cheek. ‘Let me heal you.’
I closed my eyes in consent, which seemed easier than having this discussion again with Mum. I was too tired, too sad, and no longer had the energy to fight her.
Mum placed her hands on my head and started to hum quietly. At first, it felt good just to be touched, to let her have this intimacy. The humming became louder and more rhythmic, and soon it evolved into a muffled chanting of words that I didn’t recognise. Each sound reverberated through me. I could feel her voice in my chest, in my stomach, all the way down to my feet.
The strange thing was that it did make me feel better. I grew lighter, like a weight was lifted, but heavier at the same time – the mass of my body was pressing down into the sofa, and I could quite easily have closed my eyes and fallen asleep right then. The thoughts that had been swimming around in my head, causing me to lose hours of sleep, were suddenly quiet, and my mind was still.
Mum sat back and I opened my eyes.
‘How did you do that?’
She looked down at her hands. ‘It’s a long story,’ she said, her eyes sad.
‘Well in that case, you’d better put the kettle on.’
We hadn’t known where exactly Mum had gone, that terrifying morning when we woke up and realised she was missing. All I knew was that a hole opened up in our lives, like those sink holes that appear in the earth overnight, swallowing entire homes into the bottomless black.
At some point, it had dawned on us that she had left Seahouses. That was a terrifying realisation for two girls who had believed their mother was simply hiding out somewhere nearby. By the time Auntie Sue swooped in to our rescue, we had realised that she was no longer in the country. The line crackled on her infrequent phone calls home, which would come at odd times of the day.
The police confirmed this when Auntie Sue reported her as a missing person. Mum, who hadn’t been able to leave her bedroom for several weeks, had pulled herself together enough to not only leave the house, but get on an aeroplane. When they gave us the news, we were open-mouthed, lost for words. She didn’t want to be found, they said. She was safe and well and wanted her family to be reassured of that. Auntie Sue didn’t push things – presumably, she was as scared as we were that we’d be taken away, too.
‘It all started with a book,’ Mum said. ‘About coping with grief. I don’t even remember who had given it to
