was striking how different he looked—he was twenty pounds heavier, his hair had less gray in it, and he looked so much happier. I scrolled through ten Google pages and came across some news reports about her death.
Tragic suicide of mum in Norway
Architect’s wife found dead in fjord
I skimmed news reports and the comments on the memorial page, but there was nothing to suggest Tom was implicated in her death. The prevailing narrative was very much that she had suffered on and off with mental illness and had finally lost “her battle.” Buried in Google Images were a couple of snapshots posted on social media of Tom at the funeral. I had to zoom in to check it was him. He looked absolutely crushed.
I glanced back at the diary. It lay open on my bed, the contents screaming out in blue biro. He slammed my face into a wall . . . I’m still bleeding . . .
I couldn’t believe it. This man, who looked every bit the doting husband and devastated widower, had done these sickening things. He had strangled, kicked, and punched his wife, and he had done so straight after Coco’s birth, by the sound of things. I looked at the images of her and Tom together and tried hard to see the fault lines. The woman on the pages was terrified. She was confiding in her diary because she had nowhere else to turn. And yet the woman in the photographs was happy, confident, loved.
It just didn’t add up.
I remembered what Derry had said about Maren being obsessed with Aurelia. And the newspaper clippings I’d found about someone called Ingrid Olsen who looked identical to Aurelia. I typed “Ingrid Olsen” in the search bar. About a million results came up, but after a good long rummage I figured that none of them related to the murdered girl in the newspaper clippings. The clippings dated back to 1983—before I was born.
That didn’t add up either, but the presence of the diary in my room reminded me of the most urgent issue—Tom was a violent, bullying man. Aurelia had feared for her life, and she had died. And really, I should have known better than to think Tom was all he seemed. I had the misfortune to know that, more often than not, relationships were institutions of abuse, betrayal, and occasionally torture, yet somehow I still held on to the hope that somewhere there existed a family who treated each other with actual kindness, respect, and love. I needed so badly to know it was possible, and it was crushing to consider that maybe it just wasn’t.
Coco’s screams brought me back to the present with a jolt. I had been so absorbed in the diary that I’d forgotten to sterilize the bottles. “All right, Coco,” I murmured, letting her know her milk was on its way. “I’m here.”
And as I said those words, I knew what I had to do.
I couldn’t just leave. I had to protect Gaia and Coco.
As I tiptoed along the landing I saw a mouse dart across the floor, but I didn’t care. As far as I was concerned it was earning its right to roam the house by not having already frozen to death. I raced toward the kitchen, reaching for the light switch. Nothing. The kitchen remained gray-dark, the windows all steamed up. I tried again, and again. And then movement by the window caught my eye.
A woman, standing with her back to me. Both arms by her sides. A long dress to her ankles.
Her feet weren’t touching the ground.
I opened my mouth to scream.
She was hovering. Hovering.
No, no, no. I was hallucinating again. I had been doing so well! No hallucinations for weeks. She is not there, I told my brain, but my eyes and my wildly clanging heart said otherwise. She had long dark hair, flat and damp as though she’d just come in from the rain. She was wearing some kind of jacket in a rough material, like sackcloth, and beneath it I could see a dark gray dress to her ankles. Her feet were very swollen, like blue loaves. Maybe that was why she was hovering. It looked like it’d be quite painful to put any weight on feet as swollen as that.
But none of these details mattered, and my racing heartbeat didn’t matter, because I was merely having a panic attack and my brain was compensating for the lack of a solid reason for said panic attack