Behind

by Nicole Trope

  I brought a book to read but quite suddenly I knew I needed to write to you, to leave something for you, because while I am hopeful that I’ll find myself in remission, I am also aware that doctors don’t have all the answers. Sometimes the cure doesn’t work.

  I have not seen you for twenty-one years now. It seems to me to be an unbelievable span of time. In the beginning I counted the days and the weeks and the months since I’d seen you.

  I have thought about you every day. Every single day.

  When we left, when Rachel and I ran away, I made a terrible, awful choice. I left you. I shouldn’t have left you but I also knew that if I stayed, if I waited for you to come back, he would wake up. And then, I was certain, he would kill me and then kill Rachel. I knew that for sure and it was about the only thing I was certain of as blood poured from my face and I ached all over. I had three broken ribs and a fractured wrist. I knew he would kill me if I stayed.

  Rachel was just trying to help, to save me. She was too little to understand the consequences of her actions and I couldn’t let him hurt her. I just couldn’t.

  But I thought that there was a good chance that he would not hurt you. I know he was hard on you and I know those words don’t do justice to how he treated you, but believe me when I tell you that he loved you above all else.

  You were his legacy, his son. You looked like him, and as you grew older you acted like him as well. I don’t mean that to be a bad thing. I know that some of your behaviour was because of how he treated all of us. I mean that you had most of his good traits as well. You were so clever, like him, and so good at sport and really funny. You liked the same things he liked. I thought, I hoped, that he would understand that he had to embrace you and care for you because Rachel and I were gone. I believed, in some part of me, that I was the problem, and that if I was gone, he would be better. I pray every day that’s been the case.

  I am not justifying what I did. I don’t know if he will ever tell you about the letter I sent him, begging him to leave us alone and telling him I would never see you again if he agreed. I cannot explain and I will never be able to explain how impossibly hard those words were to write. They caused my fingers to cramp and my heart to break because I loved you. You were my first child, my baby boy, my little man. When I was pregnant with Rachel, I was sure that I would not be able to love her as much as I loved you. But I did, of course. I loved her as I loved you but I believed, in the end, that she was more in need of my protection than you were.

  I made a choice and it is a choice that I have wished I hadn’t had to make – or that I hadn’t made – every day. But fear kept me sticking to what I told him in the letter. Fear for my life and Rachel’s life.

  I know your father loved you deeply in his own, sometimes terrible, way.

  I am saying that I thought that out of all of us you had the best chance of surviving a life with him. And I thought, much to my horror at myself, that if he had you, he wouldn’t try that hard to find me and Rachel.

  I made a choice. A terrible, awful choice to save my life and the life of your sister. And I have worried every day since that I left you with a man who is capable of great harm and great pain.

  At least once a week for the first couple of years we were running and hiding, I would find a call box and dial Peg Jackson’s number. It was always my intention as I punched the numbers into the keypad to tell her where we were and hopefully get her to find a way to get you to come out to us. Despite the letter, despite what I wrote to him, I wanted to try and get you to come and be with us. But each time I only got as far as listening to the ringing of her phone on the other end of the line before my heart began to race and my stomach flipped over and I felt sweat bead on my forehead. And then I hung up. Your father is a clever man. If Peg spoke to you, if she managed to get you to us, he would have killed us all. I knew I had to stick to what I said in my letter, and although he never let me know that he had read it or that he had agreed, he only ever turned up to let me know he knew where we were. He never went near Rachel and he allowed us to run again. It became a game to him, I’m sure, and then one day it just stopped and I thought it was finally over. But it will never be over because I left you.

  I admit that there was another reason I did it. I was worried that you were just like him in the bad ways as well, that you would hurt us. You were already bigger than me, and I was scared of you. I wish I hadn’t been but I was. I am ashamed to say that, but it is true.

  When you got to eighteen, I called and waited for Peg to answer because I knew that you would be an adult and I hoped to be able to reason with you. But the woman who answered the phone was not Peg. She told me they had bought the house from Barry after Peg died and I felt like my only lifeline to you had been severed.

  I could have found a way to speak to you, I know that. I could have written you a letter or contacted your school, but my fear of your father made everything seem impossible.

  It’s not an excuse, not a justification, just the truth.

  I have hated him for twenty-one years for making me leave you behind. But I have also, strangely enough, never stopped loving him. I loved you, and when I looked at you, I saw him.

  If this doesn’t work, if the cancer takes over my whole body and I die, I will leave this letter for Rachel to find. I hope that she will find a way to get it to you.

  I hope that you and your father found a way to live together without hurting each other. I hope that you have love in your life and happiness. I hope that you are not too angry at me and at your sister even though what I did should only engender anger. I hope that you have found a way to be a better man than your father.

  I love you, Kevin. I miss you and think about you every day. I dream of a time when we will find each other so that we can be a family again – you, me and Rachel. I am holding onto that hope and I will keep holding on until there is no reason to do so.

  With all my love,

  Mum

  Dear Rachel,

  Thanks for sending the money. You don’t have to, you know. I can get by without most of the stuff, although I have to admit that chocolate is my weakness in here.

  And thank you for the letter from Mum. It threw me for a bit. I have read it over many times now.

  I wish I could say I forgive her but I’m not there yet. I’m just not there. I understand her is the best I can do. I understand her because after she left, I got the full force of who he was, and if I’d had the choice, I would have run too. As it was, I was afraid and trapped, and by the time I was old enough to leave, I was hopelessly enmeshed in this dysfunctional relationship we had going. I understand her choice but I cannot accept it.

  I have started seeing a therapist once a week. I like to think that this time it will be different. This time I will tell him everything there is to tell. This time I really want to find a way through the memories into a more peaceful place. This time I finally want to change. I can see, from the way he listens when I speak, that I’m not the first person he’s heard this kind of stuff from. I showed him the letter from Mum. I don’t think he knows quite what to say about it.

  I want to thank you again for testifying at my trial. I know that hearing about our childhood and about what he did to Mum helped with the sentencing. It was self-defence. He wasn’t strong enough to hurt me when they let me out on bail before my trial but he had been hurting me for years. Every time I came home, he would hurt me again. And it didn’t matter how big I got or how strong or how old. I was always powerless against him. Until I wasn’t.

  I’m trying to untangle it all but it’s going to take time. I have no excuse for what I did to you and Ben and Beth. All I can come up with right now is that I was trying, in some really messed-up way, to reach you, to make you understand. I wanted to talk to Mum, but it was too late. You were the next best thing.

  It was so incredibly wrong and I can only comfort myself with the fact that nothing happened to any of you and that the constable who fired the gun only gave me a
flesh wound because he suspected I had nothing in my pocket.

  It feels strange to say this because I’m in prison, but I feel like I’ve been given another chance at life.

  I’m also really grateful to have your support. I feel like you and I have to learn how to be a family. We were never really taught that by our parents. Mum tried, I think, but she was too busy trying to survive, really.

  I’m really enjoying the course. Engineering was always a passion of mine and I regret that I got myself kicked out of university in first year. It was inevitable, I suppose. Once my anger met alcohol, there was really only one way things were going to go.

  I’ll be here a long time and I know that you may get tired of writing letters and sending money, so I want to let you know that I will understand if you do.

  I wish I had been a better big brother to you when you were little, but I guess I was also just trying to survive. It’s strange to think that one man could have tried to so thoroughly destroy the three people in his life who only wanted to love him. I know that he came from his own messed-up childhood, but at some point that can’t be an excuse anymore, can it? It’s no longer an excuse for me. I accept what I’ve done but I can’t change it, so all I can do is try to do better, a lot better now. I am trying, Rachel. Believe me, I am trying.

  I should get on with some of my work now.

  Thanks for the drawing from Beth.

  Please write to me again. I really like the letters, and tell Beth I love the drawing and it’s going up on my wall with the others she’s sent me.

  Thinking of you.

  Love,

  Kevin

  If The Life She Left Behind left you reaching for the tissues and holding your loved ones close, don't miss out on Nicole's phenomenal bestseller, The Boy in the Photo. In this heartbreaking page-turner, a mother is reunited with her missing son after six torturous years, but it's just the beginning of her nightmare…

  Get it here!

  The Boy in the Photo

  She becomes aware of the silence at the other end of the line. A prickling sensation crawls up her arms. Her heart speeds up. ‘Found who?’ she asks, slowly, carefully, deliberately.

  ‘They found Daniel.’

  Six years ago

  Megan waits at the school gates for her six-year-old son, Daniel. As the playground empties, panic bubbles inside her. Daniel is nowhere to be found. Her darling son is missing.

  Six years later

  After years of sleepless nights and endless days of missing her son, Megan finally gets the call she has been dreaming about. Daniel has walked into a police station in a remote town just a few miles away.

  Megan is overjoyed – her son is finally coming home. She has kept Daniel’s room, with his Cookie Monster poster on the wall and a stack of Lego under the bed, in perfect shape to welcome him back. But when he returns, there is something different about Daniel…

  According to the police, Daniel was kidnapped by his father. After his dad died in a fire, Daniel was finally able to escape. Desperate to find out the truth, Megan tries to talk to her little boy – but he barely answers her questions. Longing to help him heal, Megan tries everything – his favourite chocolate milkshake, a reunion with his best friend, a present for every birthday missed – but still, Daniel is distant.

  And as they struggle to connect, Megan begins to suspect that there is more to the story. Soon, she fears that her son is hiding a secret. A secret that could destroy her family…

  A heartbreaking, emotional and poignant drama about a family in turmoil. Fans of Jodi Picoult, Liane Moriarty and Linda Green – this moving novel is for you.

  Get it here!

  Hear More from Nicole

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  Books by Nicole Trope

  The Life She Left Behind

  The Nowhere Girl

  The Boy in the Photo

  My Daughter’s Secret

  Available in Audio

  The Nowhere Girl (Available in the UK and the US)

  The Boy in the Photo (Available in the UK and the US)

  My Daughter’s Secret (Available in the UK and the US)

  A Letter from Nicole

  Hello,

  I would like to thank you for taking the time to read The Life She Left Behind. If you did enjoy it, and want to keep up to date with all my latest releases, just sign up at the following link. Your email address will never be shared and you can unsubscribe at any time.

  Sign up here!

  For a long time, I was told to ‘write what you know’, but that never really worked for me. Instead I write what I fear.

  I write about families in crisis, about lives changing in the blink of an eye and about people who somehow manage to survive very difficult situations.

  As human beings, we make choices every day, and as parents and guardians of the next generation, we make them knowing that we are impacting the lives of those we have brought into the world or care for, in a profound and permanent way. When writing this novel, I thought about having to make a choice as difficult as the one Veronica had to make, and I had to ask myself, ‘What would you do?’ I admit I have no idea, and I also admit that I found myself in a quandary over Veronica’s choice. I hated that she made it, but I also accepted that she felt she had no other option. She should have felt she had an option because all women should feel they have options, but that’s not quite the case yet. I look forward to a time when it might be.

  I have loved writing about the bond between a mother and daughter and about the bonds of family that stretch through the years. I hope you’ve enjoyed the story of this particular family, however sad it may be.

  I usually end my novels on a note of hope because that’s what I want for the world and for those women and children who suffer.

  If you have enjoyed this novel, it would be lovely if you could take the time to leave a review. I read them all, and on days when I question whether or not I have another book in me, they lift me up and help me get back to work.

  I would also love to hear from you. You can find me on Facebook and Twitter, and I’m always happy to connect with readers.

  Thanks again for reading.

  Nicole x

  The Nowhere Girl

  I open the last message. It’s just a single line. One sentence. Five words, black letters spelling out my guilt. I know what you did.

  If you passed Alice on the street, you couldn’t help but smile. At how she holds hands with her husband, Jack. At the adoring way she admires her three beloved boys.

  But if you looked very closely, you’d see how tightly she holds Jack’s hand, afraid to let go. You’d see how her smile can fade in a matter of seconds. You’d see pain behind her chestnut-brown eyes.

  Alice has created this life out of the broken pieces of her childhood. She has told Jack that she ran away from home when she was little – but she didn’t tell him the whole story. She’s never told anyone the whole story. The truth is simply too awful to say out loud.

  And then she receives a message. After a lifetime of fresh starts, her past is spelled out in five accusing words. I know what you did. Her secret is no longer a secret.

  Someone knows what Alice did. And now the family she loves so desperately is in danger.

  This utterly heartbreaking, beautifully written and gripping family drama examines just how far we are willing to go for our loved ones, and the desperate decisions we make when we have no other choice. Fans of Jodi Picoult, Kerry Fisher and Liane Moriarty will be blown away by this incredibly moving tale.

  Get it here.

  My Daughter’s Secret

  My baby girl, I’ll never forget you – your smile, your laugh, the way your hair sparkles in the sun. I cannot comprehend this pain. I cannot breathe through it.

&
nbsp; For Claire, life as she knows it is over. And after the death of her daughter, Julia, she is searching for answers. Stumbling upon a pile of letters, hidden under Julia’s bed in an old, battered shoebox, she feels closer to her daughter than ever before. They tell her that Julia was happy, that she was thriving at university, that she was in love.

  But as the letters go on, Claire starts to feel uneasy at something hidden between the lines. Even as she grieves, she must prepare to face a shocking discovery. Because Julia was hiding a terrible secret – and when it’s uncovered, it will make Claire question everything she thought she knew about her daughter…

  An emotional and gripping page-turner that will stay with you long after you finish the last page. Fans of Liane Moriarty, Lisa Wingate and Jodi Picoult will love this moving and poignant tale that is full of shocking twists.