She looked down at the floor. A dog’s life. If only everything were that simple. He remained engrossed in his food and didn’t look up as she walked away and closed the kitchen door quietly behind her.
If only things could have happened differently; if only she could turn back the clock.
If only, if only….
She walked calmly up the stairs. By the time she reached the top, the dog had finished his food and was whining and pawing at the door. She ignored him. It was for the best.
On the landing at the top of the stairs, she could see Amber’s lunge line with her head collar attached to it. The other end was tied securely to the hand-rail with a bow line. She smiled to herself, remembering how he had taught her to tie knots, recalling happier times on the boat with him, but she was not about to waver now. There could be no room for error and she had been meticulous in her preparation, measuring the rope out carefully.
Without hesitation she picked up the head collar in one hand and stepped over the bannister, standing with her back to the rails. A shaft of sunlight streamed through the window and, as its gentle warmth washed over her face, she felt an overwhelming sense of peace and relief at the inevitability of it all. This was her destiny now and soon she would be free.
She surprised herself at just how calm she was, as she fastened the head collar around her slender neck. She could still hear the dog downstairs, but she did not falter.
‘Goodbye my darling boy,’ she whispered. ‘I’m so sorry, but you’ll be ok, I promise.’
She heard his hurtful words again in her head….
Why don’t you just fuck off, permanently?
She stepped into the sunlight and she was finally free.
PART I
The Game
Nar·cis·sist
A narcissist, by definition, is someone with a pervasive pattern of grandiosity, need for admiration, and lack of empathy, whose symptoms begin in early adulthood. Narcissists often don’t believe the rules apply to them.[1]
The Awakening
Do you ever miss yourself? The person you were before Life changed everything...?
Present Day
Grace
I know now from bitter experience that it is impossible to ever truly know another person. Deceit is two-faced and those who practise the art of deception have two versions of themselves: the idealised, sugar-coated version that they want the world to see, and the other less desirable version, the one that represents who they really are, crouching in the shadows, hidden from view.
Everyone has secrets and everyone tells lies, sometimes for the best of reasons, or so we convince ourselves, but the real danger comes when we have told a lie so often that it becomes an integral part of our lives, no longer distinguishable from the truth. It becomes the truth, or at least our version of it.
I always thought I hated lies, believing I valued honesty above everything else but, then, I never realised just how destructive the truth could be. Ask yourself whether or not you would tell a friend that you knew her husband was cheating on her. Then ask yourself the same question, if you were the one her husband was having the affair with. Life is never simple and things are never black and white but, when it comes down to it, lies never hurt anyone. It’s always the truth that hurts. Truth holds all the cards and has the power to shatter dreams, to humiliate and ultimately to destroy, but only if we let it.
When I was jolted rudely awake one day, and forced to confront a much less palatable version of the truth than the one I had been enjoying up to that point, my life as I knew it went very spectacularly and irrevocably down the pan. Suddenly, everything I knew was being challenged and I was left dazed and reeling from the aftershock of all the different twists and turns in the new and revised story of my life, a story I would never willingly have chosen to be the protagonist in.
Since that day I have often found myself thinking about Fate and how the course of our lives can be changed by one split-second action or decision. How does it feel to know you cheated death, like the people who missed their flight on the day of the Twin Towers attack, or the sick children whose parents kept them off school the day of the Dunblane School massacre?
Surely we can all look back at some pivotal point in our lives and wonder - What if...? Like the film Sliding Doors, where two completely different life scenarios are played out, with everything depending on whether or not Gwyneth Paltrow catches the subway train she is running for.
I can pinpoint my Sliding Doors moment exactly. It is etched in my memory forever and, although I have often wished that I could step back in time and play out the parallel version of my life, I’ll never have the luxury of being able to rewrite history.
Nor can I blame everything on Fate. We all have choices to make in life and, in the end, we must live by our decisions, take responsibility and accept the consequences of our actions, whether good or bad.
No excuses. No regrets.
I confess I am no angel and there is no escaping the things I have done, but I learned the hard way that none of us can ever know what we are truly capable of until we are pushed to our limits.
Everyone has a breaking point.
In my defence, I do not believe anyone will ultimately condemn me or blame me for what I did.
The Promise
If you don’t leave your past in the past it will haunt you forever and destroy your future.
23 years earlier
Grace
The seatbelt sign flashed on above me as the captain announced that we would shortly be entering an area of turbulence. The plane shuddered gently as if to confirm his warning. I looked at my husband sleeping beside me and smiled happily, slipping my arm through his. ‘My husband’ would take some getting used to, but I liked it already. We were thirty-three thousand feet in the air, bound for the Seychelles, where we would pick up the luxury cruising boat Daniel had chartered for our honeymoon, ready to spend a blissful two weeks away from it all in Paradise. The business class seats had been his extra little surprise present to me, revealed at the airport check-in desk. I downed the rest of my Champagne, snuggled closer to him and closed my eyes, but I was too excited to sleep. The last six months had gone by in a whirlwind and I still found it hard to believe that this was really my life now. After several relationship disasters, involving more than my fair share of tears and heartache, I knew without a doubt that I had found The One and I was deliriously happy.
Alone with my thoughts on the long haul flight, I finally had the time to pause for breath and reflect on everything that had happened over the last few months.
It came as no surprise to anyone that I met the man who would become my husband at a sailing event, having grown up racing on the North East coast of England with my dad since the age of seven. As a child, I was what you might call a bit of a handful: fiery-tempered, headstrong and fiercely determined in the face of any new challenge. Amazing Grace, my dad called me, having named me after Grace Darling, the heroine of shipwrecked sailors off the Farne Islands in Northumberland. Dad was Commodore of his beloved Sunderland Yacht Club and he used to take me and my older brother Jeremy out sailing every weekend in all weathers. Daddy’s girl and a tomboy, nothing fazed me and I was always determined to show I was as good if not better than the boys (especially Jeremy), having inherited my dad’s competitive spirit. After all, girls had more to prove in those days. When it was rough, I remember being wedged in the companionway with a rope around my waist and told to hold on and keep my head down. I loved every minute of it, but I learned fast to look after myself and to respect the sea.
One hand for the boat and one hand for yourself.
I could still hear my dad’s voice so clearly. On calmer days, I was given jobs to do in the race to keep my interest alive and I absorbed it all like a sponge. Dad and his friends called me their ‘little mascot’ and I had fond memories of how they patiently taught me to tie knots and trim the sails for the different wind angles. As I grew older and stronger, I graduall
y worked my way through all the different positions on the boat, starting with packing the spinnaker after every downwind leg. It was the job nobody on the crew ever wanted to do, but fortunately, I never suffered from sea-sickness (unlike poor Jeremy) and I was happy to do it, as it earned me the right to be a proper member of the team. By the time I was eighteen I was able to do most jobs on the boat, but I loved either doing the bow or helming. It didn’t matter that I got soaked most weekends and came off the water physically exhausted; to me, they were halcyon days with my dad and I smiled to myself at the memories.
I didn’t know it then of course, but the Sliding Doors moment that changed the course of my life came shortly after my twenty-fifth birthday when some friends from home chartered a J35 for The Scottish Series, a sailing event based in Tarbert on Loch Fyne, Scotland, and asked me to do the bow for them. Every race boat needs a reliable bowman on the team and I was forever grateful to my dad for the skills he taught me, knowing that, thanks to him, I could be a useful member of any crew. As bowman, my job, in a nutshell, was to ensure that the sails at the front of the boat went up and down as they should, quickly and efficiently. There was quite a bit more to it than that of course, but getting around the marks with perfect spinnaker hoists and drops could gain valuable time and we all knew that races could be won and lost by seconds.
I jumped at the chance to race at Tarbert, such an iconic event in the UK sailing world, and I was even more excited as I knew the J35 was a very competitive boat. Fate had already set a collision course for Daniel and I, and he showed up at the regatta in his brand new, state of the art race boat, Mistress. Everyone was talking about his J125, the new, forty-one foot, high-performance yacht from J Boats, with its carbon bowsprit and huge asymmetric, neon green spinnaker. The guys on the J35 were no exception.
Throughout the regatta, which ran over a long weekend, I engineered every possible opportunity for myself to meet up with Daniel and his crew but, in the end, it was not until I stopped for petrol on the long, four-hour drive home from the event that I finally got to speak to him. Our chance meeting in a service station on the outskirts of Glasgow would be the subject of many a joke for years to come and naturally featured in the best man’s speech at our wedding. Finding myself in a long queue waiting to pay for fuel, I had no difficulty recognising the tall, fair-haired man next to me or the boat name and unmistakable logo of a woman in bondage gear on his sweatshirt. I knew Daniel Callaghan was the boat owner, from all the press coverage of the new yacht throughout the week. No time to be shy, I decided quickly.
‘How did you do at the Scottish Series?’ I ventured. ‘I was there as well with some friends. We were watching you guys on the water. The boat is stunning. You must be over the moon with her.’
I could not help sounding just a bit star-struck and was conscious of the fact I was talking faster than normal.
‘A couple of great wins, but not so good overall, I’m afraid.’ Daniel shrugged his shoulders. ‘Two of the crew let us down, so we were a bit shorthanded for the conditions yesterday.’
His voice was soft and low, with an unmistakable Irish lilt that I found particularly sexy. I wanted to keep him talking and bombarded him with questions as we waited to get served. To my delight, he appeared only too happy to talk boats with me and suggested we grab a coffee before carrying on with our journeys. He lived a couple of hours further south than me, in a small village in ‘God’s own country’ of Yorkshire, which was actually where my parents came from, so it felt like there was an instant connection. We chatted easily, having loads in common, and soon I was telling him all about my sailing background and what I had been racing on at Tarbert. He bought me a cappuccino and seemed in no hurry to end our conversation.
‘Well, it sounds to me like we could do with you on the crew. Honestly, you’d be welcome on my boat any time. There’s always room for a good bowman and the craic is good, as we Irish say.’
My stomach flipped as he winked and handed me his business card. I realised he was flirting with me and inwardly cursed my grubby, boat sweatshirt and the state of my hair, that I had been unable to tame, despite my hurried best efforts in the toilets before joining him in the café.
‘Seriously,’ he continued, ‘why don’t you come out sailing with us? Just give me a ring if you’re free one weekend. I mean it. I keep the boat in Liverpool, which is about three hours away from you, I guess. Plenty of hotels and B&Bs nearby.’
I struggled to hide my excitement and had to force myself to at least attempt to sound casual.
‘I would love to take you up on that if you’re sure. I’ll give you my number if you’re ever short of crew.’
I quickly borrowed a pen from behind the bar and scribbled my number down on a beermat.
When he rang the next day, it was to invite me out to dinner and my Fate was sealed. My Sliding Doors moment.
Two months later, we were engaged. Three months after that, we were married. What you might call a whirlwind romance.
The plane jolted and shuddered violently, dragging me back to the present as I remembered the equally turbulent events of the previous day. Our wedding. To say that it did not entirely go as planned was a bit of an understatement.
Daniel had told me early on in our relationship that he did not get on well with his family and stated categorically that he did not want to invite any of them to our wedding. He never talked much about them and the few snippets I had picked up had been either dragged out of him, much like trying to get blood out of a stone, or gleaned from conversations with friends. He grew up in a coastal town called Ardglass, in Northern Ireland with his parents and younger brother Kieran, but the family moved to the UK when he was seven, to escape The Troubles. They stayed in Liverpool for a couple of years, before moving again and settling in Fellside, a small village in Yorkshire, where they lived in the house Daniel now owned. His father was not one for being tied down and had several affairs over the years, finally moving out to go and live with one of his women. His mother left not long after the split, leaving a nineteen-year-old Daniel to look after himself, the house and his loose cannon of a brother, just two years his junior. They had never heard from her again and he had not spoken to, or seen, his father in years. There were no photos of Daniel as a child as all the family photos had, apparently, been destroyed several years ago in a fire started by his brother one night after a riotous party involving an excess of drugs and booze. The fire almost destroyed the house we were about to start our new life in, the family home Daniel had finally bought from his father after the fire.
To be honest, Kieran sounded like a total nightmare but, nevertheless, I decided to make it my mission to mend the rift in the family, imagining how grateful everyone would be to me for doing so. Daniel did not share my enthusiasm for a reunion and told me categorically that it was best not to open up old wounds but I was intrigued by the whole thing and felt compelled to find out more about his mysterious past. To my irritation, the more I probed, the more stubborn Daniel became in refusing to talk about it. In fact, he pretty much refused to talk about his family, full stop. It was as if he wanted to completely erase his past. My own family was a close-knit unit and I was determined to do my best to fix his, convinced he would thank me for it in the end. To my way of thinking, our wedding was the perfect opportunity to build bridges.
I handed him a rum and coke one evening and took a deep breath, preparing to confront the elephant in the room.
‘I really think we should invite your father and your brother to the wedding and I’d like to try to track down your mother. They are your family at the end of the day and I think it’s time you sorted out your differences.’
Daniel’s face hardened.
‘Not a good idea, I can assure you.’
‘Oh come on, a lot of water has flowed under the bridge, surely? You’ve told me a bit about what happened, but it was all a long time ago…maybe it’s time to forgive and forget?’
I waited. He sighed and rub
bed his hand over his face.
‘Not this again. I told you already, we’re just not close and we don’t get on. There’s no big mystery, despite what you seem to imagine. We simply have nothing in common any more…we never really did. I don’t understand why you’re so obsessed about it. Why can’t you just leave the past in the past? It’s the future, our future together, that I’m interested in now and I don’t want anything spoiling our day.’
‘Well, if that’s really all it is, I don’t get why they can’t come,’ I persisted. ‘What harm can it do? I just think it’s sad to let the rift between you get worse and worse. You’ll regret it if anything happens to one of them and you haven’t made your peace.’
I immediately cursed my lack of tact as I remembered he had told me he lost his first wife in a car crash a few years earlier. The last time he saw her alive, they had argued and he had never forgiven himself. He had confided in me about that on our second date, keen to make sure there were no secrets between us, no hidden skeletons in closets. Honesty was everything in a relationship, he had said.
‘You’re determined to keep pushing this, aren’t you? You always think you know best. So go on then, invite them. Just don’t blame me when it backfires on you,’ he snapped.
His tone was challenging, daring me to do it, to go against his wishes so, naturally, I did exactly that.
Unfortunately, as it turned out, he was proved right, much as I hated to admit it. His father did not reply to the wedding invitation and refused to answer phone calls. There was no card and no message to wish us well. He was clearly not about to engage in any bridge-building activities and I began to sympathise with Daniel’s less than positive attitude towards him. His mother seemed to have disappeared off the face of the earth and clearly did not want to be found, so reluctantly I had to give up on that one too.
Twenty Years a Stranger (The Stranger Series Book 1) Page 2