I Let You Go

by Clare Mackintosh

They exchanged half-smiles in mutual acknowledgment of the adrenaline rush it always felt so wrong to enjoy when something so horrific had happened.

Is it possible to simply walk away from one life and start another? I have to try: it is my only chance of getting through this in one piece.

In the time he’d been a copper, political correctness had reached a point where anything remotely personal had to be skirted around. In a few years’ time people wouldn’t be able to talk at all.

So true!

I don’t read the road signs, taking instead the smallest road offered at each junction, the least-traveled option. I feel light-headed—almost hysterical. What am I doing? Where am I going? I wonder if this is what it’s like to lose one’s mind, and then I realize I don’t care. It doesn’t matter anymore.

I pull my phone from my pocket and, without looking to see how many missed calls it shows, I drop it into the ditch beside me, where it splashes into the pooled water. It is the last piece connecting me to my past, and almost immediately I feel freer.

The grief I feel is so physical it seems impossible that I am still living; that my heart continues to beat when it has been wrenched apart. I want to fix an image of him in my head, but all I can see when I close my eyes is his body, still and lifeless in my arms. I let him go, and I will never forgive myself for that.

The tide is as far out as it can go, a line of driftwood and tattered rubbish left on the sand like a dirty ring around a bathtub.

It seems strange to see my name so bold and unashamed. I’ve been invisible for so long, and what am I now? A sculptor who doesn’t sculpt. A mother without a child. The letters are not invisible. They are shouting: large enough to be seen from the cliff tops. I feel a shiver of fear and excitement. I’m taking a risk, but it feels good.

The beach is covered with writing of all sizes, like the scribbled ramblings of a madman, but I can already see the incoming tide licking at the letters, swirling the sand as it inches up the beach. By this evening, when the tide retreats once more, the beach will be clean, and I can start again.

He left me his number, but he doesn’t know I threw away my mobile phone.

I shake myself. When did I become so pathetic? When did I lose the ability to make decisions; to solve problems? I’m better than this.

Puberty had turned his son into a grunting, uncommunicative teenager, and he was dreading the day the same thing happened to his daughter.

she was a DC in a busy CID office,

he’s got a file to get in on the GBH on Queen’s Street—CPS have gone for a charge.

“but it might make me feel better if you don’t spend all morning with a face like a bulldog chewing a wasp.”

I studied photography as part of my art degree, but sculpture was always my great passion.

Five years of someone’s life is too much to lose over a throwaway comment.

if he still has the same attitude to school when he gets to GCSE year, he’s buggered.”

I am slowly beginning to think that perhaps I am not as useless as I once believed.

Beau is my guard dog. I haven’t needed protection yet, but I might.

Gradually, without my noticing, my grief has changed shape; from a raw, jagged pain that won’t be silenced to a dull, rounded ache I’m able to lock away at the back of my mind. If it is left there, quiet and undisturbed, I find I’m able to pretend that everything is quite all right. That I never had another life.

My heart is thumping and I’m struggling to catch my breath. I’m not even sure now that it’s Patrick I’m frightened of; he’s become mixed up in my head with the panic that grips me every day.

“Thank you,” I say, and although it is not only inadequate but unoriginal, he smiles at me as if I have said something profound, and I think how easy it is to be with someone so undemanding.

There have been no ANPR hits on it since the hit-and-run, and although the tax has lapsed, it hasn’t been declared SORN, so my guess is it’s been dumped or burned out.

I used context clues to decode this sentence, but I still have no idea what ANPR and SORN stand for.

You were sitting in a corner of the student union when I first saw you.

I didn’t clarify that “all over the world” currently meant Ireland.

“Ian Petersen.” I held out my hand to shake yours, feeling the coolness of your skin against my fingers, and keeping it there for a fraction longer than necessary. “Jenna Gray.”

I had noted it in my diary against the day we met, as I always do.

took care to ask you more about yourself, and I watched you unfurl like a leaf seeking moisture.

“They’re dead.” I had told the lie so often I nearly believed it myself.

You wanted me—that much was obvious—but you didn’t yet want me enough.

My stomach clenches with fear, and for the first time I wonder if I can get through this. I remind myself I’ve survived worse.

But could he charge, knowing there could be more to it than met the eye? The evidence told him one thing; his instinct was telling him another.

I couldn’t settle for the rest of the day. I cleaned the house and swept up all Marie’s things from every room and gathered them in a pile in the bedroom. There was more than I thought, but I could hardly give it back to her now. I stuffed it all in a suitcase to take to the dump.

I still am not sure who Marie is. I may have to read this again.

Someone jostled against me and sloshed beer onto my shoes, but I was too intent on my search to demand an apology.

The sound twisted itself into my head until each cry made the anger rise up inside me a little more; a white-hot rage I recognized but over which I had no control.

Okay….maybe this guy is INSANE

I recognized the look in your eyes. I used to see it in Marie’s—that mixture of defiance and wariness—and it made me as angry to see it on you as it did to see it on her. How dare you be afraid of me?

Yep, probably insane.

had thought that you were different, and that perhaps I wouldn’t ever need to feel that release again: that blissful sense of peace that comes after a fight. I was sorry to see that, after everything, you were just the same as all the others.

Definitely insane

He speaks softly, and if you didn’t hear the words you would think him solicitous. But the sound of his voice is enough to make me shake violently, as though I am lying in ice.

I was stupid to think I could escape the past. However fast I run, however far: I will never outrun it.

He had gelled his hair so it stood up in spikes as angry as his expression.

Great visual!

He’s taunting me, the singsong pace of the vow I made so many years ago at odds with the coldness in his voice. He is insane. I can see that now,

AIT have cross-referenced that with the DVLA register.

When the truth finally hits me, it’s like a knife to my stomach. Jacob’s death was no accident. Ian killed his own son, and now he’s going to kill me.

I denied anything was wrong: first because I was too blinded by love to see the cracks in my relationship, and later because I was too ashamed to admit that I had stayed for so long with a man who hurt me so much.

Grief and guilt are powerful feelings, and I began to wonder how they might affect two women, involved in very different ways in the same incident. The result is I Let You Go.