Page 44 of These Tears

The guard pushes the door wider.

I step through it just as I hear the last of it: ‘Please.’

9

It’s been a week.

Crane gave me two clean refusals, no explanation, and I still kept rehearsing the moment I’d tell him the only thing that mattered: Conall had taken the case.

I couldn’t decide which sin had done us in – the kiss, or the row – so my mind kept shuffling blame. Either way, I told myself we’d talk it out. Or, at least, write it out.

Then he didn’t respond to the letter I sent the day after I’d last seen him.

Then, Stonebrook sent the next one back unopened.

And yesterday, the programme coordinator gave me the dreaded call.

Elias Crane had withdrawn from the programme.

A clean cut. By a man who had once cautioned me not to keep knocking at locked doors and I still did.

Conall had approached me during Anna’s birthday dinner yesterday and told me to stop trying to reach his client. Though the Irishman divulged that Elias had accepted his services, he wouldn’t tell me anything about the case. Something about client confidentiality, but there had been something too guarded in the way he said it. Almost grim. He told me to stop with the letters and stop trying to see Elias, and not to even mention his name outside my own house until he was either convicted or released.

I don’t know what Conall had said that convinced him to accept his help, but I was glad he had.

Surprisingly, I hadn’t immediately fallen back into the old rituals since that day: the Riesling, the spiral, the purposeful wreckage. But still, it sits heavy on my chest: he’d cut the tether. I could already feel the drift starting up.

The seasons shake hands and autumn barrels in early. The forecasts are already warning of the coldest and earliest winter in years.

Normally I’d love that – snow and fog are obedient subjects to my lens. But the world feels too blunt. Tea goes cold and I drink it anyway. I work too much, even take Marina’s wedding gigs. Anything that makes me stop waiting for the post or Conall’s updates.

For weeks now, I’ve kept writing away. Stonebrook sent each letter back unopened.

And today, I sit in my car with my heart between my teeth and two envelopes in my hands. One addressed to HMP Stonebrook, plain and wretchedly final. It holds his pictures, his notes, every little scrap my mind had turned into evidence that this was… something. My final written goodbye on a piece of paper, too.

I wrote that I’m leaving for Norway in October, that the grant finally came through, that I don’t know when I’ll be back.

That I’m grateful for our conversations.

I fill the page with every safe truth I can think of and leave out the only dangerous one: that some part of me still wants him to ask me not to go. It weighs too heavy to be put on paper. And sits even heavier on my heart.

The other envelope is thicker; stamped and ready for Norway, carrying the future I have claimed to want for years. The grant had come with everything I needed – paperwork approved, permission secured, a life there suddenly frighteningly legal and real.

A grant for a new life. A country of beauty, snow and distance. A place I might actually survive.

One envelope buries the ghosts.

The other opens a new door.

I stare at them until the ink blurs, and the postbox across the road becomes a verdict rather than an object I’m aiming towards.

Yesterday afternoon, Rebecca assured me she’d get this letter delivered to Elias, but I have no guarantees.

I should get out of the car. Feed Norway into the red mouth first, then let Elias fall next, because that should be the sensible order of things.

Freedom before farewell.

But…