by Gil Brailey
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Faith hurried home and taking Henry’s advice, immediately consulted the Internet, her hand trembling, her heart thumping and vibrating right round her body, she wrote all the relevant names into the search box and waited for the results to load. By that time anyway she knew that everything Henry had said to her was true. When a photo of Nick in exactly the same ill-fitting suit came up she let out a little scream, saying out loud, “Oh my God, Nick.”
She read what she could about the case. (Nick had left a suicide note documenting everything that had happened.) First of all he had asked his mother to his flat, demanding to know why she had subjected him to years of misery at his boarding school, then to more years of misery at the hands of his aunt and uncle, asking what he had done to deserve it. When she laughed in his face he stabbed her, and kept on stabbing, then driving the short distance to his aunt’s house, he broke in and knifed them too. All this two weeks after Kirsten’s funeral. He then went back to Renfield Road and while his grandparents slept, he hung himself with a washing line from the bannister on the top floor of the house.
At first Faith was devastated, mortified that she and Nick would have no future together, but when she thought about it, she consoled herself thinking that maybe what they did have was by far superior. A deep bond that transcended the banalities of life, a bond that tied them together forever. She just knew that as long as she lived at 77 Renfield Road he would always be near her, he would always be her forever guy.
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CHAPTER 5