“I’ll disappear, do my time, and everyone can be free from feeling the guilt and misery they feel when they see my face. Mum never has to worry about turning the corner and bumping into your pitiful arse. You don’t have to deal with me. Mum doesn’t have to look at me and see the eyes of her attacker every time the sun comes up. She can finally move the fuck away from this wretched place you’ve forced her to stay in, or she can stay and enjoy it while being free. My girl can find someone better than me and live her life. There won’t be two of us out there. I’ll be well hidden from the world. Everyone wins. Everyone but you and me, and that’s a fate I’m more than happy to deal with if you are.
“But you ever try fuck with my mum again, mess with Lilac, upset Wayne, go near my brothers, even breathe in my family’s direction, and I swear, I’ll break you and your life apart. I’ll make sure you get sent down for rape, helping to dispose of an old man’s body, the whole damn works. I’ll bring your high-rise, built-up-from-lies world crashing down around you, and I’ll have the biggest smile on my face when I do it. One quick DNA test and it’s over, Marty.”
He stared at me: ghostly pale and mute.
“Call it karma. A taste of your own medicine. Whatever the hell you like. I might be the one going to jail, sure, but believe me, you’re the one now serving a sentence. I’m your greatest creation. The one capable of holding all your mistakes over you for the rest of your sorry, miserable life.”
I meant it. He knew it.
The rest went as smoothly as going to prison could ever go.
I pleaded guilty in crown court the very next day, trying desperately to ignore the wailing of my family as I avoided making eye contact with anyone. A week later, I had to appear in front of the judge once more for my sentencing. No complicated trial. No heated discussions of right and wrong. No dragging up the worst moment of my mum’s life to try to save my skin, or reliving the night Chris died in front of a jury for Lilac. The last thing I wanted was to spend months dragging their lives through the mud. I couldn’t stand the thought of any smug lawyer trying to taint Lilac’s character or call my mum a liar.
It was easier this way.
The judge didn’t flinch or blink when he issued my eight-year sentence.
Eight years.
I would be twenty-five on my release if I had to serve the whole time. The reality of that fact hit me the second the words fell from the judge’s mouth, but I’d take it. To save the two women I loved more than the own beating of my heart, I’d take every punishment the law could throw at me.
They told me I could be out within four years if I managed to keep myself out of trouble while serving my sentence. I wasn’t getting my hopes up. Trouble had a way of finding me and dragging me back to it every time I tried to walk away, so I prepared myself from the worst but held on to that tiny shred of light and faith that Lilac had given me the very first time she looked into my eyes.
“Are you?” she whispered.
“Am I what?”
“A hunter?”
“No.”
“Have you ever tried to be?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“What would I hunt?”
“Magic.”
I would hunt for that magic deep down in my soul in order to survive.
But four years without seeing Lilac’s face was a whole other sentence entirely. It may as well have been twenty-five.
She’d hate me for leaving. She’d hate me for giving up, in her eyes, so easily. For walking away, for not letting her visit, defend or fight. But she would be better off. I’d rather hurt her once and let her live a life filled with travel, adventure, and all those sunshine dances and flower-filled days she’d been born to embrace, than for her to sit around waiting for me to get out. She shouldn’t have to wait for anyone. She shouldn’t have to care for my family or feel pity every time she looked into my eyes and saw a hint of the monster called Marty Atkins lurking beneath the surface.
I made a plan. A plan to write Lilac one letter and let her break apart so she could build herself back together. That’s all I could give. It’s all I had left. That was the thing about Lilac, though. She never did what you expected. She crumbled when you thought she’d fight. She fought when you thought she’d crumble. She was unpredictable, and I had no idea how she was going to taste my attempt at rejection.
THIRTY
Lilac
He’d made his confession and set it in stone. No room for argument, questioning, or alteration. Joel had acted as the primary witness, confirming I had nothing to do with it. He wanted to be rid of Toby as much as I needed him to stay. It was the final nail in the coffin.
Not only was Toby charged with manslaughter, but he was charged with his assault on Joel, too.
The assault that had no doubt saved me from the same fate as Darlene.
All any of us could do was sit around and wait.
Every night, with the scent of Toby’s aftershave and body spray still lingering on his sheets, I would climb through his window, lay on his bed and cry myself to sleep, praying to every deity to get him out of the cold, lonely cells I imagined him rotting in. That’s the downside of having an imagination. It makes terrible scenarios seem like living nightmares in your mind once you let it run away with itself.
Toby didn’t want to see me, and I didn’t know whether that hurt more than the thought of not seeing him for years. Darlene was a mess. A numb, broken mess, being held together by my parents and Aunt Coral, as well as Wayne, who had moved back in with the boys the instant he’d heard about Toby’s arrest. Between Darlene and Wayne’s guilt over the whole situation, and my utter sorrow, Crooked Mount became a washed up, barren island of emptiness. The winter flowers disappeared beneath ice and snow. The trees never moved, the wind never shook us. The birds stopped flying near the ocean. The cars seemed to pass us by in silence, the world unmoving and still as we waited, unblinking, staring at the end of our street, hoping to see the boy we’d all taken for granted walking back to us, coming home to where he belonged.
But that day was far away, and time only passed by slowly. Ever so slowly.
The day they buried Chris, half of the town attended. Except for our two families. The ones who lived side by side and had become family, united by injustice and grief, and we weren’t ashamed of our choices, either.
Joel paraded himself around like a wounded soldier who had arrived back from battle, losing a valiant friend honourably. His father, Marty, however, seemed somewhat quieter than usual.
After leaving the station that day and promising Marty I would fight, none of us saw him around as we expected. He didn’t gloat or make a statue of his son for the whole of Southwold to worship. He didn’t march down the streets like he was invincible anymore. He didn’t do anything any of us expected. He became invisible. A ghost. A missing person. Something about that made my newfound anxiety rise to the surface and take up permanent residence there. A snake never stayed in the shadows for long.
It needed to feed eventually, and no amount of skin-shedding would change that.
All I could do was wait and listen for the sound of the hiss.
And always be ready.
THIRTY-ONE
Toby
Lilac,
Don’t hate me.
I know you’re angry. I would be, too, but sometimes we have to make decisions that will change the course of everything forever. I wanted you to be my forever, but once the truth came out, all I wanted was for you to be free of it all. Free from the trauma. Free from the crap that ties us down when you, of all people, aren’t meant to be tied the hell down.
You once told me that you felt safe around me. I latched onto that because I needed you to need me. Now all I need is for you to know is that you don’t need anybody.
You never have done.
Not since the days when I first laid eyes on you and watched you take on the world with nothing more than a camera in your hands and all these beautiful
ideas in your mind. There wasn’t anything that scared you. You used to tell me that mountains were made for climbing, that the stars were born to shine. You had all these ways of making everyday things sound like they were rare diamonds that only we could find at the bottom of the oceans.
Go back to that.
Be seventeen. Young, foolish, reckless. Dance until you’re sweaty. Kiss a boy without baggage on the beach somewhere far, far away and be selfishly in love.
No prison visits. No sad love songs. No tragic poems.
I didn't do this to be a hero. Truth is, this is the coward’s way out. I’m not a good person. I know you think I am, I know you only see the best of me, but I have this anger burning away in the pit of my stomach, Lilac, and it’s always there. It fucking scares me. It never gives up, and sometimes I feel like I was always meant to be here—always supposed to end up in this isolated cell. If it hadn’t been Chris, it would have been someone else in the future. Probably my own father. Wouldn’t that have been a dream?
I’m seventeen, and I’m broken, held together by your strips of hope and your un-teachable magic.
But I’m still seventeen and broken.
This is my way of taking myself away, fixing what’s wrong with my life and learning about who I am without tripping over myself and stumbling into you anymore. I need to be among the others—the damaged, the violent, the hungry. I also needed to make sure you were all safe and free, that they couldn’t get to you anymore. I’ve guaranteed that now. I can’t tell you the specifics, just that you won’t be bothered by any of them again. You’re free to do anything. All of you are.
Maybe I’m making the biggest mistake of my life. Maybe I’m doing what’s right in the long run. Who knows? I sure as hell don’t. The only thing I do know with any clarity is that I love you, and it kills me to let you go, but that’s what you do when you love someone. You save them, and then you set them free. Right? Tell me I’m right.
So, go, live the next few years of your life for both of us, Lil, and if you find someone else who loves you like I tried to, feel no shame or guilt about following your heart.
And thank you.
You’re the best thing to ever happen to me.
Sing like I’m listening… every single day.
Toby.
THIRTY-TWO
Lilac
“Bullshit!” I cried, throwing the letter on my bed for the eleven-hundredth time that day.
“Language,” Mum chastised.
My feet carried me over the same tracks in the carpet, marching me from point A to B and back again in less than ten angry strides.
“He’s trying to do the right thing,” Aunt Coral added.
“Cow crap.”
The two of them let out a sigh, and I saw the way they eyed each other as they leaned against the wall by the door, their arms folded across their chests. They’d been standing on guard for the last two hours. If I hadn’t been so enraged, I might have felt guilty for taking up so much of their time on yet another day, post-Toby. But I was enraged. I was angry, fuming, bitter and resentful. My face was sweaty, despite how cold it was in Southwold now. My hands and feet throbbed, pulsating with fury at the injustice of life.
“Why are you so mad at him?” Aunt Coral asked quietly.
“Because he told me he knew how much I loved him. He told me he understood my feelings and that letter is a total kick in the teeth. Move on, Lilac. Live, Lilac,” I mimicked. “What are our lives? Some kind of tragic, romantic drama where he fades away while I laugh, despite losing the best thing in my life, and skip off into the sunset, all bruised and battered, until I stumble upon a pretty rich man with no soul while lounging on some beach in goddamn Bora Bora?”
“He didn’t mean it like that.”
I snapped my arm out, pointing to the letter and curling my lip in disgust. “Are you kidding me? You have listened to what he’s written about twenty times now. I’ve read every single patronising word out to you.”
“Oh, we heard you, all right,” Mum whispered.
“All I heard was how much he wanted to save you any pain,” Aunt Coral offered.
“That’s because you’re on my side.” I looked at Mum. “Both of you. You’re as bad as Marty Atkins and the rest of this town, willing to let Toby be damned as long as I can keep rolling around in the flowers for a few more years.”
“Hey, now,” Mum argued weakly.
“What? It’s true. You’re all happy enough to let him rot in there because you can’t bear the idea of me being the one to serve time even though I was in the wrong. It was me who killed Chris.”
“We don’t want him to rot. We’ve just been focused on you, Darlene, the boys.”
“No, you’ve buried your heads in excuses to avoid dealing with the truth.
“Lilac, that’s not what…”
“Stop it!” I reached up to grip my hair and squeeze my eyes shut. “All of you, stop it. Stop telling me I’m going crazy or I’m overreacting. Stop telling me that what happened that night didn’t happen. Stop telling me it wasn’t me who killed Chris. Stop telling me that he’s doing the right thing. Stop protecting me. Just stop it.”
“Darling, calm down, please. I’m getting so worried about you.”
“Lilac, we don’t want to hurt you any more than you’re already hurting,” Aunt Coral interrupted as my shoulders began to sag. I was exhausted, heavy, having not slept for weeks and weeks. Christmas had been and gone under a dark cloud of despair, with the two households only making any effort at all for Toby’s two little brothers. They didn’t deserve to miss out because life was being a son of a bitch to the rest of us.
“You don’t know this pain…” I winced, letting my hands fall by my sides. More tears threatened to fall, but that wasn’t anything new these days. I’d cried more since that fateful night than I had in the seventeen years previous. I became stuck between wanting to crawl under a rock and not surface until his release and doing the exact opposite by building placards and setting up petitions to 10 Downing Street that begged for his release.
It’s so hard to fight when you’re weak.
It’s so hard to wake each day when you’re exhausted.
“You just don’t know,” I croaked, scrunching my face up in agony.
“I might know some of your pain,” Aunt Coral whispered.
My eyes shot up. Aunt Coral’s red hair was scraped back into a loose bun, and she was wearing that look I remembered all too well growing up. The one that wanted to believe in love, but also knew the price you paid to feel it sometimes.
“What do you mean?”
“Don’t, Cor,” Mum sighed.
The atmosphere became tense, but Aunt Coral’s face remained pure and calm. A free soul, willing to spill all its secrets at just the right time if it had to.
Now, apparently, was that time.
“It’s okay, Vi. She deserves to know now. If it helps her heal in any way, it’s worth it.” Aunt Coral reached up to grab my shoulders, her smile turning sad.
“What’s going on?”
“I know what it’s like to lose the boy you loved the hardest, Lilac. I don’t want to take away from your pain by talking about my own, but you should know you’re not alone.”
Her eyes sparkled as her smile reached the corners, whatever memory flashed through her mind making her features light up with admiration and affection.
“I’m going to tell you a secret now. One you can’t share with anyone outside of this room.”
“Why not?”
She sighed, the release heavy and slow. “Because it could ruin lives.”
I frowned, ignoring the prickling of my skin that warned me I wasn’t going to like this.
“The first boy I ever loved was only fifteen when I met him. I was fifteen, too, and the minute our eyes connected, it seemed like I’d met him before. Sounds horrendously cheesy, doesn’t it, but it was true. I remember his piercing eyes, the way he used to march down the school halls, the way he
always seemed to offer me a shy little smirking smile that I never saw him give to anyone else.”
“Did he love you back?”
“I thought he might, at some point. We became the best of friends. We became inseparable. I helped him pass his exams, even though he was on course to fail at one point. I sat next to him when his dates with other girls went wrong. I bandaged up his scrapes and bruises when he played rugby too rough, or when he got into a fight with a boy who saw him as competition. I was the girl he ran to when he needed anything. Anything at all.”
The corner of my mouth twitched but smiling felt like cheating on Toby, so I pulled it back in line, staring into my aunt’s eyes as they glazed over instead.
“I think he loved me in his own way,” she added.
“You never got together?”
“Just once. He came home from another of his epically bad dates, and he ran down the street to find me. He ran so fast, by the time he got to me, he was purple, barely able to take another breath. I searched him from head to toe, running my hands up and down his shoulders and arms as I looked for a wound, an injury, anything… and when I finally realised there wasn’t anything physically wrong with him, I looked up at his face.”
“What happened?”
“He kissed me. Just… kissed me. It was like he’d been desperate to do it for so long, the hunger swept us both up, and before you know it, one thing led to another, and…”
“You made love,” I whispered.
“It was the most amazing moment of my life. My first time and it was with a boy I loved with all my heart. I gave it all away to him that night, and I had no regrets the morning after. None. But when he woke next to me, he broke down. Said he loved me too much to lose me like he’d lost the other girls and he couldn’t risk a relationship. He couldn’t live without me as a friend.”
A Girl Like Lilac Page 25