Page 145 of Love at First Fright

I was here. In this manor. Eating those exact crisps.

That couldn’t be right. Why would I have been here, eating crisps? This place was miles from Bristol, from my life there.

The memory consumed me. I was feeding someone else the crisps—a young guy with copper-red hair, lying with me on a red picnic blanket near the old well. Sunlight filtered through the oak trees as I placed another crisp between his lips. He laughed, the sound bright and carefree. There was something forbidden about it; this was something private, something we couldn’t let anyone see.

His wheelchair rested nearby on the grass, its metal gleaming in the afternoon sun. My acoustic guitar lay beside us, the scratched body warm from the sun.

Michael. His name was Michael.

I liked Michael. I liked him very much, even though he wasn’t my usual type.

What the hell? Charlie’s confusion flooded through our shared consciousness. What’s going on?

I jerked back, severing the connection so violently that Charlie gasped and stumbled forward.

“Bloody hell,” Charlie breathed, catching himself against the bed frame. His face had paled, and he’d started shivering.

“Are you alright?” I reached out instinctively, my hands rubbing against his arms as if I had warmth to offer him.

“I’m fine,” Charlie said, though his voice wavered. “That was… weird. But I’m fine.” He wrapped his arms around himself. “Just cold now.”

“Did you see it too? That memory?”

“Yeah.” Charlie’s blue eyes fixed on mine. “Who was that guy?”

“I don’t know. I mean, I do, his name was Michael, but…” I ran a hand through my hair, frustrated. “I only remember feeding him crisps. Here. In the manor’s garden.”

“I assume he was your boyfriend?” Charlie said. “Not your murderer, judging by the way you were feeding him crisps.” Was I imagining that tiny, tiny edge of jealousy in his voice? Probably, but it still sent a lovely warmth through me regardless, even as confusion clouded everything else.

I tried to summon more images of Michael, concentrating until my head ached. Red hair. Wheelchair. That laugh. But nothing else surfaced from the fog of over twenty-five years.

“Surely if he really was my boyfriend, I’d remember him,” I said. “I never really had a proper ‘boyfriend.’ Just a string of encounters in club toilets and behind the chip shop. Nothing else that lasted more than a couple of weeks, really.”

Charlie shrugged. “Well, maybe he was someone you’d started seeing, then.”

The questions multiplied in my head like bloody rabbits. Who was he? Why was I here with him? What was he to me? And most pressing of all, What exactly happened in 1999?

I floated away from Charlie, drifting to the window. The glass was grimy, reflecting my translucent form like a broken mirror. I’d spent years not remembering, actively choosing not to dig into the worst parts of what had been. After all, what good would remembering my death actually do? It certainly wasn’t going to bring me peace. I’d thought I was content with the not knowing, wrapped it around myself like armour.

But now…

Now Charlie was here, and everything felt different. More urgent. More real.

I crossed to the cracked wardrobe mirror, lifting my T-shirt to stare at the wound between my ribs. The puncture looked as fresh as the day I’d died. Dark and precise. There was no doubt about it: someone had put this hole in me deliberately.

Footsteps approached behind me. Charlie’s arms slipped around my waist, his chest pressing against my back. His fingers traced gentle patterns around the wound, careful not to touch the damaged skin directly.

“Does it hurt?” he whispered against my shoulder.

“Not physically. But it’s like… like a song that’s been cut off mid-note. Just hanging there, unfinished.”

Charlie’s hand stilled. “Do you want to try to remember? How it happened?”

The question hung in the air between us. I’d been running from that answer for so, so long.

“I… I think I do,” I said finally.

My eyes fell to the guitar by Charlie’s window, in its cracked leather case. The same instrument from the memory.