Sister

I try to move, but my body is still too doped and numb, and the bindings are too tight. The darkness feels almost solid now—not velvety like storybooks, not smooth and soft, but with spikes of fear, and if you prodded it, you’d find hard, jagged evil crouching behind it. I can hear something inches away from my face as I lie on the concrete. A mouse? An insect? I have lost sense of auditory perspective. My cheek feels sore; it must be pressed into a little unevenness in the concrete.

What if it isn’t adrenaline that’s keeping me awake, but I am properly conscious now? Perhaps I swallowed less sedative than I feared or have somehow come through the other side of the overdose and survived it.

But it makes no difference. Even if my body isn’t fatally drugged, I am tied up and gagged and William will be back. And then he’ll discover that I’m alive. And he’ll use the knife.

So before he returns, I need to make things clear to you. Everything happened as I told you, beginning with Mum’s phone call telling me you’d gone missing to the moment William left me here to die. But my ending will be the same as yours, here in this building, untold. I didn’t have the courage to face that, or maybe I just love life too much to let it go so quietly. I couldn’t fantasize a happy ever after, but I did imagine an ending that was just. And I made it as real as I could, my safe fantasy future, all details in place.

I worry that you’ve been waiting for DS Finborough to save me, but I think you felt a judder in the story when I told you about our lunch in Carluccio’s. It was only a comforting rug of a daydream to lie on instead of cold concrete, and it wasn’t admirable or courageous of me, but I know you understand.

And I think you’d already guessed, a little while ago, that there was no Mr. Wright. I invented a lawyer not only so I could play my part in a just ending—a trial and guilty verdict—but because he would make me keep to verifiable facts and a strict chronology. I needed someone who would help me understand what happened and why—and who would keep me from going mad. I’m not sure why being sane as I die is so important to me, just that it is, overwhelmingly. I do know that without him, my letter to you would have been a stream-of-consciousness scream, raging despair, and I would have drowned in it.

I made him kind and endlessly patient as I told him our story, and bereaved so he would understand. Maybe I’m more Catholic than I realized because I also made him my confessor but one who, even when he knew everything about me, may in some fantasy future have loved me. And during the long hours he became more real to me than the darkness around me, more than just a figment of a desperate imagination, acquiring his own personality and whims that I had to go along with, because he didn’t always do my bidding or serve the purpose I asked of him. Instead of helping me paint a pointillistic painting of what happened, I made a mirror and saw myself properly for the first time.

And around him I put a secretary with a crush and painted fingernails and daffodils and a coffee machine and inconsequential details that braided together made a rope of normality, because as I fell over the precipice of terror and my body became incontinent and shook with fear, I needed to grab hold of something.

And I made his office overly bright, the electric light permanently on, and it was always warm.

My pager sounds. I try to shut my ears to it, but with my hands tied behind my back, it’s impossible. It has sounded all through the night, every twenty minutes or so I think, although I can’t be certain how long I was fully conscious. I find it unbearable that I can’t help her.

I hear the sound of trees outside, leaves rustling, boughs creaking; I never knew trees made so much noise. But no footsteps, yet.

Why isn’t he back? It must be because Kasia is having her baby and he’s been with her all this time, and is still with her now. But I will end up mad if I think this, so instead I try to convince myself that there could be any number of reasons why William was called to the hospital. He’s a doctor; he’s paged all the time. His hospital delivers five thousand babies a year. It’s for someone else that he’s been called away.

And maybe DS Finborough investigated that “query” he had about your death, as he said he would, and has arrested William and even now is on his way to find me. It isn’t just wishful thinking; he is a diligent policeman and a decent man.