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I wanted to tell her that since I had killed Steven I had felt safer than ever before, because I was the one people needed to watch out for, and being the one people needed to watch out for was the safest way to be.
That was the rule I had made when she was born: I would give her everything, and ask nothing in return.
I couldn’t think how to articulate that food stopped being food when you didn’t have it, that it swelled and bloated as you shrank. It became the way you ticked off the hours, how you judged a good day from a bad one, something you stored when you had it and mourned when you didn’t.
Kids aren’t born loving you. Needing you, maybe. But not loving you. You have to put the work in for love.” “But I told you. No one ever told me what the work was. I didn’t know what to do.” “No one told me either. No one ever told me any of it. But if you want to, you figure it out. And then you figure it out a bit better the next day. And you carry on doing that for all the days. Most of the time it’s really hard and boring, but it’s not impossible. You just have to really want to do it.”
Perhaps that was what felt biggest of all—having found Mam unrotted. She was smaller and quieter and better than before. She was clean. She was stable. She was earning money and stocking her cupboards. It was what had happened for me when I had found out I was pregnant with Molly, except it had happened in reverse. I had built myself up because Molly had arrived. Mam had done it because I had left.
The outside world dried me into a liquidless husk. It was lonely and it was safe. Nothing could hurt me if I had nothing inside.
That was what happened to kids like Steven: they got frozen in a state of perfection, ever pure, ever wonderful, because they were only ever two years old. Most kids lived long enough to make mistakes and let people down and do bad things, and they weren’t perfect, they were just living. Kids like Steven didn’t get to carry on living, so they got perfection instead. It was a kind of trade.
Deep down I knew people couldn’t go back in time. Deep down I knew people couldn’t come back alive again once they were dead. There were lots of things I didn’t know about dying—how it felt, how it worked, almost everything, really—but the one thing I had learned was that it lasted forever. When someone you knew died, you didn’t die with them. You carried on, and you went through phases and chapters so different they felt like whole different lives, but in all of those lives the dead person was still dead. Dead whether you were sad or happy, dead whether you thought about them or didn’t, dead
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