After She Died

by Collette Heather

  He didn’t, and the moment had passed.

  “My God, this place is amazing. I didn’t realise that anyone actually lived in these houses. I mean, I thought they were just holiday homes for the rich, or holiday lets.”

  “Yeah. When this one came on the market, I nabbed it. But the mortgage on it is pretty steep, I have to say.”

  “I bet. There must be a lot of money in computers, huh?”

  “I guess I do okay.”

  Ethan’s place was directly on the seafront, on the other end of town. This small stretch of five, detached houses were deeply unusual with their black-panelled facades and were notoriously upmarket with the price tag to match.

  “How many bedrooms does this play have?” she asked in awe, unable to tear her gaze away from the spectacular view.

  The raised, concrete promenade separated the house from the pebble beach, a five-foot high concrete wall preventing people from wandering into the front gardens of the properties. A high, wooden gate to the side was the only shared entrance to these homes.

  “Just the two. Do you want me to show you my bedroom?”

  She blushed hard when she realised what she had asked. Ethan laughed and she squirmed in a mix of embarrassment and arousal.

  I shouldn’t be here, she thought for easily the tenth time since she had entered his home a few short minutes ago.

  “It’s okay,” she replied, smiling at him as he came over to her by the window with a glass of red for her and a bottle of beer for himself.

  “I hope you like seafood, I forgot to ask.”

  “I love seafood.”

  “That’s good, then. I’ve made a king prawn salad.”

  “Sounds lovely.”

  They lapsed into silence for a moment, both of them sipping their drinks and gazing out at the churning grey sea. It had begun to rain, a light drizzle that painted the scene further shades of grey.

  When Cassie twisted her head to glance at him, he was staring at her. She felt her face heat up again and she hurriedly looked back out of the window.

  “The view’s beautiful,” she said, taking a big gulp of wine to hide her schoolgirl blushes.

  “Yeah. It is.”

  Somehow, Cassie didn’t think he was talking about Whitstable’s coastline.

  I shouldn’t be here…

  “So,” she said, clearing her throat. “How long have you lived here, then? I love what you’ve done with it.”

  As she spoke, she turned away from the window to properly take in the room, admiring the sleek lines of the smooth, white walls, high ceiling and pale, beach-wood floors. The open plan space was decidedly nautical in theme, with the blue and green striped curtains, complete with matching cushions on the wooden-armed sofas.

  “Less than a month. I’m still tied in for the next few months on my rental in London, so I’m dividing my time. I’ve handed my notice in at work and I’m going freelance. Everything seems to be coming together nicely. Touch wood,” he said, touching his head. “And I haven’t done anything with the place – it was like this when I bought it. It was a job-lot price. I figured, why change it, you know? When in Rome, and all that.”

  She knew exactly what he meant. A seafront property such as this was supposed to look a certain way, and this place had achieved that aesthetic in spades. There was even a lifeboat ring hanging on what looked very much like an old ship’s mast that ran the length from floor to ceiling over by the sleek, modern kitchen.

  “Well, it’s lovely,” she said honestly.

  “So you’re going self-employed. That’s a big move.”

  “I made a lot of connections at work and you know how things are nowadays, everything happens online doesn’t it? Give it a few years and such a thing as an office won’t exist anymore.”

  She laughed softly.

  “Yeah. Maybe.”

  “How about you?”

  The relaxed laughter died on her lips.

  “I have a degree in Journalism. But I haven’t done much with it.”

  Or anything with it, more to the point. She stared into the depths of her wine glass and noticed it was near empty. When had she polished that off, exactly?

  “Would you like another drink?” he asked, reaching for a glass.

  “Sure, that would be nice, thank you,” she said, doing her best not to sound too keen.

  She didn’t want to sound like an alcoholic and a layabout.

  “Sorry if I’m coming across as prying,” Ethan called over his shoulder as he headed to the kitchen to refill her glass.

  “You’re not,” she said, staring out of the window with her back to him to hide her blushes.

  “Why don’t we sit down?” he said when he came back over.

  From the way he sat down on one end of the long, red, leather sofa, she guessed that it was a rhetorical question. She perched on the opposite end to him, forcing herself not to snatch up the wine glass.

  “So,” he said, smiling at her. “I have decided to stop being such a nosey bastard. It’s just that you intrigue me, but I respect that there are some things that are perhaps a little personal. So I shall control myself around you. What kind of music are you into, then?”

  “Anything, really,” she said, cringing as soon as the words left her lips.

  The one thing in the world that wound her up was an insipid answer to that particular question. She cleared her throat to elaborate further on her answer.

  “I mean, I guess I’m more into the alternative side of things, rather than the stuff that’s in the charts. I like indie pop and electropop and some industrial metal. My sister…”

  Was really into the darker stuff, she was on the brink of saying, but managed to bite it back in time.

  Shit, why am I talking about Chloe?

  “You have a sister?” he asked with interest. “Older or younger? Does she live in Whitstable too? What does she do?”

  “I…yes. A twin, actually.”

  “You have a twin? Are you identical?”

  “She’s dead,” she said flatly.

  “What?” he asked, his pale-blue eyes widening dramatically. “How? That’s awful, I am so sorry.”

  “Yeah. Me too.”

  No longer caring if he thought she was knocking back the wine too fast, she reached for her glass on the little wooden coffee-table in front of them and took a large gulp.

  “Cassie, I’m so sorry, I had no idea. Was her death recent?”

  “Five years ago.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Yeah.”

  “What happened?”

  And there it was. The million-dollar question. She put down her glass on the coffee table because she was trembling so violently, and she didn’t want him to see. They both lapsed into silence, and inside, Cassie winced. He was waiting for her to speak and panic bloomed in her guts. Why had she allowed the conversation to veer in this direction? She should just shut it down, right now.

  Yet deep down, she wanted to talk about it. She barely even knew this guy, yet there she was, on the brink of spilling her guts.

  It was like, she wanted him to know how damaged she was.

  “I have issues, Ethan,” she began slowly, not even sure herself where she was going with this. “My sister killed our parents. And she tried to kill me, too.”

  She closed her eyes for a second, the all-too-vivid memories of that night exploding in her mind.

  I shouldn’t be talking about this.

  But she was so tired of carrying the burden of it. She was so tired of the nightmares and the panic attacks, of the inability to properly function.

  “I didn’t mean to pry,” Ethan said softly. “We can change the subject if you want to. But Jesus. That is hardcore. How do you cope with something like that?”

  “You don’t,” she answered honestly. “You do your best to bury it, but you carry it with you, every single day. It eats away at you until you feel like there is no you left. Until you don’t even recognise yourself anymore.”

>   “I’m sorry.”

  She twisted her head to look at him, struck by the compassion that seemed to r adiate from his pale blue eyes.

  “Thanks.”

  Inexplicably, a lump formed in her throat and her eyes prickled. She couldn’t cry, that wouldn’t do at all.

  “Seriously, I didn’t mean to upset you. Shit, I can be so insensitive sometimes.”

  The kindness in his voice was too much, and she jumped to her feet in an attempt to stem the flow of tears. It worked, after a fashion, and she went back over to the window and gazed out to sea.

  “Is that why you wear gloves?” he said to her back. “Something happened to your hands, that night?”

  “And the rest,” she said without turning around.

  She had spoken so softly, and because he didn’t immediately reply, she didn’t think that he had heard her.

  “How bad?”

  “How bad are what?”

  “Your scars.”

  Tears prickled her eyes.

  “How did you know?” she whispered.

  This time when he spoke, she jumped because he was behind her:

  “I can see it, in your eyes.”

  She leaned against the windowsill. For some reason, she wanted to tell him. In fact, she felt that she had to. Neither could she lie to herself for her motives. If she was going to have sex with him, then he needed to know.

  “Yes, I have scars,” she said matter-of-factly. “Scars on my back. Knife scars. And a bullet wound. In my leg.”

  “All from that night, your sister… You know.”

  “Not my back. But everything else? Yes. My hands are burned. I was lucky, with my leg. It didn’t do any permanent damage, inside. It aches, sometimes, when it gets really cold, but otherwise…” Her voice trailed off before she composed herself once more. “I guess I was lucky.”

  The words sounded hollow, even to her own ears.

  “I don’t talk about it all that much,” she said, still without turning around. “In fact, you’re pretty much the first person I’ve ever spoken to about it, you know, apart from my husband, of course, and the various officials at the time…” And my shrink, she thought, but didn’t say.

  “Well, I’m flattered you should choose to tell me. Really. I am.”

  The warmth in his voice was a balm to her troubled soul and alarmingly, the tears threatened to stage an appearance once more. She swallowed them down.

  “Dinner smells amazing,” she said, thinking it was high time she changed the subject before she scared him off for good.

  “I hope you like it. In fact, it’s pretty much ready. Why don’t we sit down and eat?”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  They ate at the little wooden table on the other side of the beam that separated the kitchen from the rest of the large room. The prawn salad was delicious, and dinner passed in a pleasant blur of light conversation. Cassie found herself unwinding and relaxing into his company – he really was so easy to get along with and for a moment, it was almost easy to pretend that she was just an ordinary girl without a care in the world, simply connecting with an interesting guy her own age.

  Ethan was telling her about his family:

  “I’m an only child. My parents moved up North to the Lake District. I visit them when I can, mainly at birthdays and Christmas. You know how it is. Oh God I’m so sorry. I’ve done it again, haven’t I?”

  He looked visibly shaken from potentially having put his foot in it at the mention of parents. Cassie smiled reassuringly at him, in that moment genuinely not bothered by his faux pas because this was the first time that she had felt so relaxed in ages. In fact, now that she came to think of it, she felt positively fuzzed around the edges. Her mind felt fogged, her limbs heavy and relaxed.

  “S’okay,” she said, mildly surprised rather than alarmed to find that she was ever-so-slightly slurring.

  How much have I had to drink?

  She put down her knife and fork, having had her fill of the prawn salad.

  “So, tell me, what have you been up to today, then? If you don’t work, how do you fill your time?”

  She focussed on his face, but truth be told, he was looking a little blurry. Under normal circumstances, his question may have brushed her up the wrong way, but she had too much of a buzz on to be irked.

  “I…” she began, then stopped.

  Because the truth was, she couldn’t quite remember. The tipsy unfurling of her mind aside, sometimes she got a bit hazy. Days had a habit of blurring into each other, especially when Hugh worked such long hours. There were times, like this very instance, when she simply could not remember details.

  “I put a lot of work into doing the house up,” she said, picking her words carefully and finding it difficult not to trip over them. “Hugh gave me free rein to do what I wanted, and I put a lot of effort and thought into that. It took me a few years…”

  She stopped speaking, fully aware of how lame and shallow she sounded.

  “It’s completely understandable. Whatever gets you through. It’s all part of the healing process.”

  “Yeah.”

  Now she really was feeling rather odd. Her head was positively swimming.

  “Are you okay?”

  His voice seemed to drift to her from very far away and she stared hard at his face. He was definitely out of focus now, there was no two ways about it. She cupped the side of her face with her left hand, as if trying to collect her fragmented thoughts and now-spinning head.

  “I don’t think I feel so great,” she mumbled, staring at her near-empty plate.

  Her skull was beginning to feel like it was too tight for her brain and bizarrely, her eyelids were so heavy.

  “Why don’t you come and sit on the sofa,” Ethan said.

  She got to her feet, feeling very much like she had left her head behind when she had been sitting down. She swayed slightly on the spot.

  “I think I might have had too much wine.”

  She looked at the empty bottle of red on the table – there was less than a mouthful remaining of the bottle in her glass. Ethan had been drinking beer so the dubious honour entirely befell her.

  She flopped down onto the sofa, the room lurching around her like she was on the deck of a ship.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said, tripping over her words and slurring them.

  “You have nothing to be sorry about,” Ethan said, sitting down next to her on the sofa, concern creasing his brow.

  Or at least, she thought it was because she was seeing two of him right now. She allowed herself to flop backwards, everything now swimming around her.

  “Shit. I would drive you home, but I’ve had too much to drink. Do you want me to call you a taxi?”

  His voice seemed to be coming to her from very far away, like she was at the bottom of a well. She wanted to say that she just needed a moment, that maybe he could call for a taxi in a little while when she had sufficiently composed herself, but somehow, the words wouldn’t come.

  “…you a glass of water,” he said.

  The words didn’t really make any sense to her and she closed her heavy eyelids.

  Only for a moment, she told herself.

  She didn’t open them again for many hours.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Cassie’s eyelids fluttered open, her head throbbing but her mind entirely blank.

  Groaning, her hands flew up to her eyes when bright light pierced her retinas. She squeezed her eyes tightly shut behind her palms, her mind still a big fat blank. Her body ached, her head ached, and slowly, fragments of memory came back to her.

  Putting on a nice dress in her bedroom at home – something much nicer than she would normally wear. Applying her makeup with a shaking hand – taking far more care with it than she normally would.

  Arriving at Ethan’s, a bundle of nerves.

  Telling him the barest bones of her dark past – shit, had she really done that?

  Passing out on the sofa…


  The sofa.

  She lurched upright, only that second realising that she was on the very same sofa that she had crashed out on after dinner. Her head swam with the sudden movement, feeling very much like it was still attached to the nautical-striped cushion.

  She blinked, squinting in the morning light. Low sunshine streamed in through the wide window before her and she got shakily to her feet. Her head was clearing with every passing second, but she still felt disjointed and strange, disconnected somehow, much like the physical feeling of recovering from flu.

  “Hey. You’re up. I expect you could manage a coffee.”

  She jumped, spinning around on the spot at the sound of Ethan’s voice.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said, the words as instinctive as breathing.

  She looked down at her bare feet in shame, then gasped in further humiliation. Her black dress was rucked up around her waist, revealing her plain black knickers and a good portion of her lower stomach.

  “Shit,” she gasped under her breath, yanking down the hem of her dress to her knees where it belonged.

  Oh wow. Now that is embarrassing.

  “I’m sorry,” she mumbled once more, feeling the heat radiating from her cheeks. “Where’s your bathroom, if you don’t mind?”

  She couldn’t bring herself to meet his gaze when he replied:

  “First door on your left up the stairs.”

  “Thank,” she mumbled, hurrying over to the open door opposite the kitchen area that Ethan had just emerged through.

  Cassie was so distraught she barely took in her surroundings up on the small landing. It didn’t even occur to her to snoop around, so absolute was her humiliation. Instead, she threw herself through the first door she came to, pleased to find that it was, indeed, the bathroom.

  Shakily, she pulled down her knickers and sat on the toilet, relief coursing through her as she expelled urine from her body in an almighty rush, it only then occurring to her that she hadn’t peed for well over twelve hours. That dealt with, she went to wash her hands in the modern, marble sink, nearly too scared to observe the wreckage that would be her face.