“Hev …” Nikki reached over and squeezed her hand briefly, and again Heather found she couldn’t look at her friend’s face. “Some things … Some things can’t be figured out, or reasoned away.”
Heather nodded, looking down at the sticky table top.
“Anyway, let’s not talk about this, shall we? It’s rubbish. How are you? It’s been a little while since we last did one of these random booze ups. What are you up to now? Still teaching, I assume?”
“I am, and I can tell from the face you make when I say that, that you’re horrified.” Nikki smiled and took a sip of her spritzer. “I’m teaching at a college now, which you would know if you ever paid attention to my Facebook updates. I’m covering the English and History departments. Are you still at the newspaper?’
Heather winced, then tried to hide it by eating several chips at once. “It didn’t work out. I’ve been freelancing for a while and it suits me better.” More bad memories. She downed the rest of her drink, and raised her eyebrows. “Another?”
They spent the rest of the afternoon in the pub, both switching to soft drinks when the edges of the room started to blur. At some point, one of them suggested getting food, and soon the table was crowded with plates, with smears and blobs of alarmingly bright yellow curry sauce and scattered bits of poppadum. They talked about school, dredging up all the old stories that must by tradition be dredged up at such times. Eventually, the evening crowd began to arrive, and they agreed that it was likely time to make their way home—spending all day in the pub was not, Nikki pointed out, a great look for a teacher.
“Suit yourself, professor.”
Outside, the day had grown gloomy and cold, and as Nikki called them a cab, Heather found that the small cache of good spirits she had built up over the afternoon were leaking away into the shadows. She wasn’t going home now, to her untidy yet cozy room in a house shared with other untidy people; she would be going back to her mother’s empty house, no doubt to a long night of trawling over bad memories and unanswered questions. Something must have shown on her face, because once she slipped her phone back in her pocket, Nikki touched her arm softly.
“Hey. Cab’s going to be a few minutes. Are you all right?”
Heather shrugged. The fizzy drinks were a sour slick in her stomach, and she felt too weary to pretend.
“The suicide note was really weird. Did I tell you that?”
Nikki shook her head, her brown eyes somber.
“I mean, like you said, she was in a bad place, and there’s no real reason to expect a suicide note to make sense, I suppose.” Heather tried to smile, but it twisted into something sickly on her lips, so she stopped. Instead, she opened her satchel and slipped a piece of paper from out of her notebook. It was pale lilac, with a picture of a wren at the top next to a banner reading “notes to you”. For reasons she didn’t want to look too closely at, she’d kept it with her since the police handed it over along with her mother’s belongings. Her mother’s cramped handwriting hunched in the middle of the page. She passed it to Nikki, who frowned and smoothed it over carefully with her fingers.
“To you both. I know this will be a shock, and I’m sorry that you will have to deal with all this mess, but I can’t live with it anymore—not knowing what I know, and the decisions I have had to make. They say this is the coward’s way—well people who say that don’t know what I’ve lived with, this awful shadow I’ve lived under forever. All those monsters in the wood never really went away, not for me. And maybe that’s what I deserve. I truly am sorry for everything to come, for what it’s worth. Despite what you might believe, I love you both, and I always have.”
Nikki didn’t say anything, instead pursing her lips and looking down the high street. After a moment, she touched a finger to the corner of her eye and sniffed.
“Oh, Hev, that’s awful. Your poor mum.”
“Don’t you see though?” Heather took the note back, folding it away into her bag. She was glad to have it out of sight. “To you both. I love you both. What does that mean? There’s only me. She had no other family left. And what is she talking about, these decisions?”
Nikki shook her head slowly. “Okay, it is weird. But maybe she meant you and your dad? If she was very unwell, she might have forgotten that he’d died already, somehow. Or … or, she could be talking to whoever found her body.”
“But both sounds so specific. Like she had two people in mind. And monsters in the wood? What the hell does that mean?” Heather sighed. “You’re right, she could be talking about Dad, I suppose, but I hate not knowing. Like I’m going to spend the rest of my life wondering what she was on about—as if dealing with all this shit wasn’t bad enough, she had to leave a vague and cryptic suicide note.” Somewhere up the street, a dog was barking, and a light rain had started to fall. The road was mostly deserted as people hurried to get out of the drizzle, but up toward the bus stop, a shadowy figure stood,
