She’s Mine
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Eight
Chapter Forty-Nine
Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty-One
Chapter Fifty-Two
Chapter Fifty-Three
Chapter Fifty-Four
Chapter Fifty-Five
Chapter Fifty-Six
Chapter Fifty-Seven
Chapter Fifty-Eight
Chapter Fifty-Nine
Chapter Sixty
Chapter Sixty-One
Chapter Sixty-Two
Chapter Sixty-Three
Chapter Sixty-Four
Chapter Sixty-Five
Chapter Sixty-Six
Chapter Sixty-Seven
Chapter Sixty-Eight
Chapter Sixty-Nine
Chapter Seventy
Chapter Seventy-One
Chapter Seventy-Two
Chapter Seventy-Three
Chapter Seventy-Four
Chapter Seventy-Five
Chapter Seventy-Six
Chapter Seventy-Seven
Chapter Seventy-Eight
Chapter Seventy-Nine
Chapter Eighty
Chapter Eighty-One
Chapter Eighty-Two
Chapter Eighty-Three
Chapter Eighty-Four
Chapter Eighty-Five
Chapter Eighty-Six
Chapter Eighty-Seven
Chapter Eighty-Eight
A letter from A.A. Chaudhuri
Acknowledgements
Copyright
Cover
Table of Contents
Start of Content
She’s Mine
A.A. Chaudhuri
For my Family, the greatest gift in life
‘In a child’s eyes, a mother is a goddess. She can be glorious or terrible, benevolent or filled with wrath, but she commands love either way. I am convinced that this is the greatest power in the universe.’
N.K. Jemisin, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms
Prologue
I walk into the room, and she turns to smile at me. But I don’t smile back.
I know that behind that smile lies a monster.
A psychotic, self-serving monster whose only agenda is to destroy lives.
She reads this on my face. Sees the change in me. Displays a fear I have never seen before, yet at the same time, and what is most sickening, no remorse.
‘Look, don’t be dramatic, I can explain.’
She is poison. I act quick. Grabbing the nearest cushion before she has time to defend herself with yet more lies.
And with a force brewed from a rage I hadn’t thought myself capable of, I press it hard against her face. Hard into the sockets of her eyes. Crushing the bullshit out of her deceitful lips.
It feels good. Cathartic. Satisfying. Harder and harder until she is still.
Those lips will lie no more.
Chapter One
Christine
Now
February 2019
This is my first visit. Not to a psychiatrist, but to this particular psychiatrist, Dr Freya Cousins, who, at this moment, is sitting just a few feet away from me. Unlike the other psychiatrists I’ve seen over the years, she works from her home off the Finchley Road and, conveniently, only two stops from where I live with Greg, my husband, in St John’s Wood.
Before it happened, and my life, me, the person I was back then, changed forever, beyond all recognition, I had never imagined myself the type to visit a psychiatrist. In fact, should anyone have suggested it to me, I would have laughed in their face, considered it an insult to my highly educated, fully functional, supremely in-control self.
Back then, my opinion – which now makes me cringe with shame – was that psychiatrists were time-wasting money-grabbers. Failed medical doctors who preyed on weak-willed losers gullible and dumb enough to be fooled by their psychobabble, their incomprehensible jibber-jabber, designed purely to make them sound more intelligent than they really were, and which only ended up making their patients feel more depressed, more confused, more suicidal than before they started seeing them.
But then it happened. I lost you. And after that, I was never the same again. I went from being the most self-assured, rational person I knew, to a feeble, mentally unhinged nervous wreck who, for a year after, could barely pluck up the nerve to make a cup of tea, let alone leave the house and function anywhere like a normal person.
And suddenly, psychiatrists were the only people I felt able to talk to. Neutral players who would listen without judging me, and who, unlike my family and friends, I could look in the eye without feeling sick with guilt.
I lost you. How the fuck could I have lost you? This wasn’t supposed to happen to someone like me. The worst nightmare imaginable for any parent shouldn’t have happened to someone like me, so why in God’s name did it? Why did I turn my back on you, walk away, prioritize a phone call over my precious child?
Why?!
I have tortured myself with these questions every day for the last twenty-three years, and it never gets any easier.
There are two reasons for this. The first is that we never got closure. You were never found, and so we don’t know what happened to you. Whether you are still alive, or whether you died within hours, days, of being taken. And the not knowing, the not having closure, is torture. It haunts my dreams at night, plagues my waking thoughts, and there is no escape from it. I am its prisoner, and I fear that my sentence is infinite.
The second is that, although I have never told anyone this, not even the police, in my heart I know why it happened; why I turned away and failed to keep my eye on you as any mother should. And the reason is something I feel so ashamed of it’s a wonder I am still alive and not destroyed by guilt. It’s also why my relationship with Greg is dead.
You see, I was too cowardly to tell him the truth, even though he deserved to hear it. I couldn’t bear to cause him further pain and so I consciously pushed him away because it was the easier thing to do.
The fact is, my darling, I let both of you down because I was selfish; too caught up in my own superficial needs and desires to think about the
consequences of my actions. And that is why I find it hard to look Greg in the eye, let alone allow him to touch me, console me. I am simply not worthy of his love or compassion. Or anyone’s, for that matter.
It is my fault, and mine alone, that you are gone.
I only had more children out of guilt, to please Greg, not because I wanted them. In fact, having your brother and sister made things worse rather than better. I despise myself for saying this, but it’s the truth.
Greg, who has a heart of gold, thought having more children would help me get over losing you, help repair our relationship, bring us closer together again. But it didn’t work like that. I could never let myself love them the way I loved you. I was too afraid that if I gave my heart and soul to them, if I truly immersed myself in them, and they were then, somehow, taken from me, I would never recover. I couldn’t chance that; I couldn’t possibly go through that again. And so, although I did all the functional things a mother is supposed to do, I did so dispassionately, and this has cost me dearly.
Now in their twenties, Ella and Daniel resent me. They eye me with a coldness that freezes me in my tracks every time I see them. But I cannot blame them. It is my own doing. They love Greg with a far greater tenderness than they love me; if, in fact, they love me at all – they’ve never actually told me so, at least, not since they were little. And even then, it was probably only because that’s the kind of thing children say when they are small. It’s automatic.
The fact is, I don’t really know them; they are virtual strangers to me, as I am to them, and when they see me, they seem to look through me, perhaps because all they see is a hard, empty shell of a person. A mother that could have been, but never was. A mother in name only. Indifferent and self-absorbed.
* * *
‘Don’t be afraid, Christine.’ Dr Cousins’ soothing lilt stirs me from my thoughts. ‘First of all, just tell me a bit about yourself – your background, where you live, your family.’
Like so many of her well-intentioned peers have done over the years, she is encouraging me to open up to her. Hoping the cathartic process of talking about myself, facing my demons head-on, will somehow make life more bearable. Help me to stop blaming myself every day of my life for your disappearance.
Help me to accept that you, my Heidi, my little girl, are gone and never coming back.
If only that were possible. Because the fact is, I can’t stop blaming myself, and I cannot accept that you are gone. I will never accept that. So why am I here? If I don’t want to get better, don’t feel that I can, why am I talking to this woman?
It all comes back to the secret I’ve never dared tell anyone. A secret I kept even from my closest friends, Janine and Miranda. A secret so bad, so shameful, I don’t deserve to be happy again, and I certainly don’t deserve Greg – the best husband anyone could wish for.
But is Dr Cousins the one to whom I will, at last, unload the burden I’ve carried all these years? It’s not just that I am afraid, it’s also that I have never felt completely comfortable with any of my psychiatrists. Never felt that I could trust them with my deepest, darkest secrets. But perhaps she’ll be different. Perhaps she’s the one I’ll finally feel able to trust.
I guess time will tell.
Chapter Two
Christine
Before
Your fingers tiptoe along the small of my back, making me quiver with pleasure; a calorific, insatiable pleasure that knows no bounds. They have traced this path countless times before, and others besides, but I never tire of your touch. It just makes me come back for more. You do something to me; have this hold, this power over me, a power that always makes your touch feel as exquisite as the first time. That delectable, heart-raising first touch at the start of an affair; a feeling which sends a rush of electricity through you, makes you heady, horny, as soft and light as a marshmallow. When you know that what you are doing is wrong and hurting those closest to you, but at the same time, you cannot stop yourself because nothing else in this world compares to that feeling.
You must know that it was never my intention to have an affair with you; to be smitten with a man who wasn’t my husband. I have always been one to play by the book, the goody two shoes at school and beyond, the one to urge my flightier peers to exercise caution, to think before they act, to be careful not to let their heart rule their head. Such Mills & Boon sentiment is not in my nature, and I have never been one for clichés. I’ll happily swear to that, even though my actions now suggest otherwise.
You – the one I am having an affair with behind my gentle, unsuspecting husband’s back – aren’t right for me. We would never work as husband and wife; we’re too similar, and we would drive each other nuts. But there’s this unquenchable carnal attraction between us that neither of us can resist; it sizzles through me, propels me towards you, and you to me. You are my cocaine. A drug that is bad for me, that will no doubt kill me eventually, but makes me feel so high at the time. You are the drug I simply can’t get enough of.
My husband adores me. Which makes my adultery more unpardonable, my guilt so much worse. He has loved me from the first. His expression said as much the moment we first locked eyes. I remember there being such genuine warmth to his gaze, an earnestness that made me feel so secure, I instantly felt that I could trust him. And then, slowly but surely, I fell in love with him. He was the safe, sensible choice. Husband material. Father material.
But you? You are the opposite. You are selfish, power-driven, career-obsessed, and you have no doubt seduced more women than I would care to imagine. But that’s what makes you so bloody irresistible. You make me weak, literally weak at the knees, and as I walk into the hotel lift with you right now, your fingers still skating across my back, I swallow my guilt and luxuriate in the moment.
Greg keeps me safe, and he will keep the child growing inside me safe, despite my uncertainty as to whether it is his. But our affair keeps me alive.
I cannot stop myself, despite my conscience telling me that someday I will be made to pay for my actions, and my perfect life will be no more.
Chapter Three
Heidi
Now
I am not dead.
I am alive, breathing, safe, intact. Physically intact, at least. Whether I am mentally is debatable. What’s not debatable is that I am so much better off with her than I would have been with you.
Despite never being short of love or attention from her – who I’ll always consider to be my real mother – when she told me the truth, it changed me. It rocked the very foundations of my existence. So you see, no matter how much love she showered me with, there’s always been this underlying sense of discontent, betrayal, hurt, haunting my soul. It tugs at my insides, makes me feel bitter and vengeful.
Of course, I was too young to remember the day you abandoned me. The day you took your eye off the ball and lost me, all because you prioritized a call from your lover over watching your vulnerable two-year-old daughter. How could you have done that? A highly educated woman. Didn’t it occur to you at the time that children get abducted every day? Didn’t you read the papers, watch the news? For some reason, like my mother told me, you thought you were above all that, proving what a self-centred person you are. A person who stuffed her child’s mouth with a dummy so that she could take the call in peace because it suited her.
Thank God my mother (again, not you, you’re not my mother even though I have half your DNA), was watching. Thank God she saw how neglectful you were, took pity on me. Recognized that you were too wrapped up in your own selfish desires to be a fit mother. That you would starve me of love and attention the way you’ve since starved your other children. And she wanted to stop me from becoming a carbon copy of you: a vain, self-absorbed slut. A man-eater who seduces other women’s men; men who should have stayed true to women who would have gone to the ends of the earth for them. She saved me while I was still young enough to be saved, before I became indoctrinated with your mindset, with your immoral lifestyl
e. The day she took me was the most fortunate day of my life, and I am so grateful to her. She raised me to be a kind and considerate person, despite her shitty childhood, and I respect her for that. She is someone who always wanted children, who always puts her family and friends first. Someone who’ll do anything to protect them, loyal to the last. She is the best person I know, and I am so lucky that she is my mother, and not you.
When she told me what happened, what kind of a person you were – still are, in fact – it hurt badly, I won’t lie. But I soon came to understand and appreciate why she told me. She didn’t want to lie to me the way you have lied to so many people over the years. And I empathize with her desire to hurt you. Because I want to hurt you too. And that is why I am going to help her achieve that.
I really don’t know how you can live with yourself. You’ve enlisted yet another shrink hoping somehow she’ll be different. But the fact is, no amount of counselling can absolve you from what you did.
You need to learn your lesson, Christine. You might think you’ve suffered enough, but you haven’t. You need to suffer more and you need to come clean so the world will finally see your true colours and justice can be served.
I am alive, but the most glorious part is that you have no idea. You will soon, though. And I can’t wait to see the look on your face, Mummy dearest, when I reveal myself to you.
Chapter Four
Christine
Now
I lie flat on Dr Cousins’ couch and try to relax my shoulders which are tense and knotted from anxiety, and the intensive weight training which, over the years since you disappeared, has rendered my body unrecognizable from how it was before. Of course, when I fell pregnant with Ella and Daniel I had to ease up. Which was tough. It didn’t sit well with my need for control. But even then, I still hit the gym up to thirty weeks gone. It was selfish of me, and it stressed the hell out of Greg. But I didn’t care. It was that or go insane. Gone are my fulsome breasts and generous curves, the rounded hips and loose tummy flesh which should serve as proud marks of childbirth. Instead, my arms are long and stringy, my biceps protrude through my close-fitting turtle-neck jumper like Cox’s apples, my chest is flat like a prepubescent boy’s, my hips are straight and bony, my stomach hard and steel-like, the result of one thousand crunches a day and relentless planks.
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