ALSO BY NICK ALEXANDER
The Road to Zoe
You Then, Me Now
Things We Never Said
The Bottle of Tears
The Other Son
The Photographer’s Wife
The Hannah Novels
The Half-Life of Hannah
Other Halves
The CC Novels
The Case of the Missing Boyfriend
The French House
The Fifty Reasons Series
50 Reasons to Say Goodbye
Sottopassaggio
Good Thing, Bad Thing
Better Than Easy
Sleight of Hand
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2021 by Nick Alexander
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Lake Union Publishing, Seattle
www.apub.com
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Lake Union Publishing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781542026840
ISBN-10: 1542026849
Cover design by @blacksheep-uk.com
Cover illustration by Jelly London
CONTENTS
One Heather
Two Joe
Three Heather
Four Joe
Five Heather
Six Joe
Seven Heather
Eight Amy
Nine Heather
Ten Joe
Eleven Heather
Twelve Joe
Thirteen Heather
Fourteen Amy
Fifteen Heather
Epilogue Heather
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
One
Heather
Do you believe in ghosts? I don’t. Or at least, I don’t think I do.
Perhaps that means that I believe in premonitory dreams, or just freakily unlikely coincidences, because this, I swear, is true: a few days after her death, my mother spoke to me. Whether she appeared inside a dream or in what we like to call ‘real life’ remains unclear to me. I suppose we’ll never know which of those it was, so you’ll have to choose what you want to believe, or, like me, not choose and just wonder about it for ever more.
Whatever the explanation, the experience felt shockingly real. I saw her in front of me – she was semi-transparent as if made not of atoms but of light, and she was smiling. She walked towards me and paused before continuing until we were taking up the same physical space. I could sense her presence glowing and swelling within me as she expanded outwards into my fingers and toes.
I felt shocked, I remember, but the overriding feeling was one of being ecstatic to the point of tears to discover that she still existed, that despite the fact we had buried her in the cold hard earth a few days earlier, she could still visit me, be with me, be within me, even. It felt as if she was using my eyes to take one last look at the world she had recently left, and she was loving it.
As my body throbbed with the warm glow of her presence, I discovered that she could speak to me too, much as you might speak to yourself when debating what to do about some difficult situation. ‘Don’t worry,’ her voice said within the confines of my head. ‘Things will get worse, but then they’ll get better because you’ll go with the . . . and be happy.’
By the time I woke up the next morning, Mum was gone for good, and as I said before, I couldn’t tell if she’d really been there or if I’d dreamed her up. More importantly, nor could I remember that missing word, the one that would supposedly lead to my happiness.
It turned out, much later, that there was a perfectly good reason why I couldn’t remember that word: it was a term I never used. In fact, I don’t think I had ever come across it until that day, which is perhaps the strongest indication that this wasn’t a dream manufactured by my own mind but something that came from an external source. Another sign was that the thing she was referring to hadn’t happened yet, which would seem to reinforce the other-worldly origin of the message. But when I finally did understand what she’d said, it would make more sense to me than anything else in my life ever had.
I tried many times to plug that gap, made hundreds of attempts at understanding Mum’s message. But nothing that I could think of – go with the flow, for example, or go with your feelings – seemed to work. Go with the postman . . . go with grace, none of it made any sense. In fact, as time went by, Mum’s message became more and more incomprehensible, because the final part of her revelation, the be happy bit, seemed to be getting not closer, but further away.
But I’m getting ahead of myself, aren’t I? Because for me to explain how complicated being happy was, I need to tell you the whole story. And to do that, I need to dig deep and admit that I wasn’t always unhappy with my lot. In fact, for a while back there, I thought I’d struck lucky.
I’ll start my story, then, in 2009 – the year I met Anthony.
My mother was still in perfect health, or at any rate we thought she was. The beginnings of her illness must have been present, I suppose, already pushing out roots and dropping deadly seeds that would float around her body before settling and pushing out roots of their own, but we certainly didn’t know that back then.
My father had died three years earlier and Mum was enjoying a brief renaissance, having been liberated from his toxic presence by the very thing that had made him toxic in the first place: he’d died, you see, of alcohol poisoning. Is the fact that the thing which made him so hateful is also the thing that took him from us ironic, or simply logical? I’m still not sure.
Anyway, Mum – a gentle soul who had mistakenly devoted her life to a man who loved vodka more than he loved her – surprised my sister and me with
