Page 280 of These Tears

Zeroing in on the blue folder beneath the clothes – one I’d sent him as a goodbye by mistake – I take in the photos spilling out of it. I snatch it and start rearranging the contents. Beneath the prison photographs, I find the pictures of Anna and me. The second in the stack is one from the afternoon we’d spent at Burrator. The one Anna took of me alone is missing.

He’s taken my picture with him.

He’s taken Mary Shelley.

I check the drawer beside the bed. My passport is tucked in a corner.

His?

Gone.

When I reach the darkroom, drawers are standing open behind me, and I no longer have the strength to close any of them.

I should have checked this sooner.

Cameras, lights, bed, equipment. Nothing missing. Nothing disturbed.

It looks more like he’s stepped out of life than travelled south.

Back at the kitchen table, the truth has started arranging itself with fully fledged cruelty.

His mouth against mine. The dogs. The truck. The lessons. Everything I kept avoiding and half-arsing through because I believed he would always be there to do the worst parts.

Every lesson, every argument was mistaken for another expression of his need to control the world around me.

I start moving the fruit from the basket as though imposing some order on the mess might do the same for my thoughts. Apples and plums roll beneath my palm like small, bruised hearts.

My hand stops over the fruit. The plum beneath it tumbles slowly across the table and stops at the very edge. Almost falling.

Everything he’s ever said to me comes back in a rush.

Cromwell is a dangerous man.

You don’t know what’s at stake.

You saw what you wanted to see.

You dug, you argued, you put a bloody lawyer on me! You cracked the bars after I told you to leave them the fuck alone!

And finally, the last one.

The loudest one.

Change, if you have to. Adapt. Make an effort. Become the version of yourself that survives.

I take the plum and place it in the bowl sitting in the middle of the table. Then I lift the final apple whose stem catches on the cloth lining the basket. My fingers strike the edge of a packet secured beneath.

Everything in me goes still. I reach beneath the lining. My fingers close around something and I pull it out.

A letter.

With my name.

In beautiful cursive.

The letter begins:

‘My beautiful demon,’