got to see the kids every day. At these times she would open one of her sister’s letters and devour her words.
Francesca always started with ‘Hey, Katie’, which turned back the clock to a time when they were young and close, a time before Mark Brooker had left his bruise on the sweet young girl who had very little to worry her. It was, however, more than a time-travelling term of endearment; it was also an acknowledgement that that was the last time the girl who married Mark Brooker had acted of her own free will and not as a frightened puppet. ‘Hey, Katie’ was for Francesca a term of forgiveness now that she was finally able to understand what had lain behind her sister’s cold and stilted behaviour over the years. It was a way of saying, ‘all is forgiven, slate cleaned, onwards and upwards’.
Kate read and reread the snippets of information about her children, thankful beyond expression that her sister had, at Kate’s time of direst need, simply scooped them up and taken them to safety, just as she had known she would. Equally gripping were the dropped hints of ordinary life carrying on regardless – ‘Must dash, shepherd’s pie in the oven!’ – enabling Kate to picture the family around the table, chatting and eating her sister’s signature dish. And then there were the bigger details: Lydia having ‘been accepted at art college to take her foundation course’ and Dominic ‘helping Luke and his dad design the interior of a new business venture he is working on, a boutique hotel, no less! He’s coming up with some great ideas and slowly, slowly the business is finding its feet again, thank goodness.’
Having reread Francesca’s latest news, Kate could answer her own questions without hesitation. No, it would not have been better to have kept quiet, to have left the knife in her pocket. Mark would have killed her eventually, of that she was certain.
It had taken almost three years inside before Kate realised that her confidence and self-esteem were slowly returning. During her marriage she had barely registered their absence, but now she was beginning to feel that she was actually worth something, that she had something valuable to say. She could at last say ‘no’ without feeling guilty – could say no to anything, in fact, be it an invitation to tea, or an aggressive sexual demand. She finally understood that to say no was her right.
Kate knew, however, that she would always carry her experiences in every fibre of her body; she would drag the person she used to be inside her like a waterlogged sponge. Given the choice, she would have preferred a spike of emotion, an obvious grief that after a brief and explosive hysteria would have left her cleansed. But that was not how she operated. Instead, she hauled along a low-level misery that, while suppressed, would shape the rest of her life. This she accepted with a certain resignation. The fear of Mark had gone. In its place lurked a ghost that might appear over her shoulder in the bathroom mirror or creep under the duvet to spoon against her in the dark of night. These momentary jolts, these shiver-inducing memories were entirely preferable to the abject terror in which she used to live.
The loss of contact with her children sat on Kate’s chest like a dead weight. The pain of their absence was instant and sharp; it made breathing difficult and eating nearly impossible. Memories stalked her dreams and she regularly woke in tears, bereft at the recollection of the dimple in Lydia’s toddler finger, Dom’s blue woollen mitten discarded on the icy garden path. The deep, gnawing hunger she felt for them distracted her from everything she tried to do. It was debilitating and ever present, insistently there during every chore at every second of every day. Yet, like someone thirsting for water in the desert, she wasn’t able to fix the problem. Words of apology and explanation hovered on her tongue, but with neither child listening, it felt hopeless, and the frustration drove her frequently to tears. Hard as she tried, her jailers couldn’t or wouldn’t understand that it wasn’t prison per se that bothered her, it was that she needed time alone with her children, just an hour or two in which she could explain to them, comfort them. Could someone not force them to visit her? Please…
An image of her feeding them as newborns, each baby tiny,