When she opened her eyes, all she could see was blue.
Her head throbbed something fierce, like she’d fallen face-first into the wrong end of a blender. It took a second for her vision to stop swimming enough for her to realise she was staring up at the sky, the sun weakly boring itself into her eyeballs. When she turned her head, all she could see was grass around her, triangular blades whispering against her cheek. She stretched her arm out and her hand sunk into the soft, unmistakable warmth of human flesh.
That made her jolt upright, hand darting back to the ground as she gazed around herself. She could make nothing else out besides soil, grass, and patches of vibrant lilac foxgloves waving in the wind, bell-shaped heads bobbing down eagerly. And the body lying next to her.
Every fiber in her body screamed at her to get up and run away, but there was nowhere for her to go—not in this field of foxgloves and grass, a storm raging against the walls of her cranium—so she reached over and laid her hand against the body.
A man’s body, or so she assumed. Broad-shouldered and tall, torso a perfect triangle where he lay stretched out in the grass, dark hair curling down to the nape of his neck. She wondered if he was unconscious, just like she’d been, until she turned him over to see his face and her eyes met the pommel of the knife protruding from his chest.
A scream caught somewhere in her throat, but she couldn’t tear her eyes away from it. It stuck straight up from his lean chest, a stain of red wine spilling over his crisp white shirt. Dry by now, but his body was still warm beneath her fingers, flesh spongy and youthful. Whoever this man was, he hadn’t been dead long.
Her heartbeat sounded far too loud to her own ears, a sledgehammer against her already-pounding head. She could taste her own tongue, dry and cottony, and the world seemed to sink in on her, shrinking until nothing remained but the body next to her. She became acutely aware that her hands were stained in dried vermillion, like she had tried to stop the flow but failed. Foolishly, she pressed two fingers to the side of his neck, but felt nothing beyond her own racing pulse.
So he’s really dead. Dread building in her stomach, she forced her splitting head to push itself back together until the hum of her thudding heartbeat faded into background noise. Tried to remember how she’d ended up here. When she came up blank, she tried recalling what happened before she passed out. Then, her childhood.
Nothing.
Her head felt like one big bruise, but finally, a name came to mind: Erica.
My name?
It couldn’t be anyone else’s. She tried for her birthday, her age, her phone number—not that it would have mattered, because when she patted her jeans, they were empty beyond a small wad of cash, a single key fob, and a Zippo lighter paired with a half-empty pack of cigarettes in her back pocket. Nothing echoed in her brain beyond the pulsing of her migraine and the overwhelming urge to vomit.
Swallowing down bile, Erica—probably, she thought, trying to shake the cobwebs out of her mind—reached for the body’s pockets, trying to ignore the guilt cramping in her gut at the thought of desecrating a man like this. When they proved to be empty as well, she stared up at his face instead.
He was beautiful. And she knew him.
Not in the way that she knew the sky was blue or that the grass was green, but in the hazy, tentative way that she knew her own name and not much else. She didn’t know his name, or where she’d first met him, or why he was laying in the grass with a knife in his chest—but that niggling spark of recognition in the back of her mind told her that she knew him like a leaf knew the summer breeze. His dark, curly hair ran wild over his ears, lips pressed together in a soft pink pout above a sharp, defined jaw. His eyes were shut tight, but somehow, she knew that they’d always twinkled like the stars before. If it weren’t for the bloody mess of his chest, the knife still buried to the hilt between fingers curled into desperate claws, she could almost convince herself that he was asleep.
Almost reverently, Erica reached for his cheek. He was warm beneath her fingers, and despite the pallour of his skin, she could imagine spots of red blooming under her touch, high and livid on his finely-carved cheekbones. Wake up, she wanted to tell him. We’re in this together, you and me.
But he was dead, and she was alone in a field with the body of a stranger she would swear on her life that she knew.
She wanted to shake him, but that would dislodge the knife from his chest and he’d bleed out more than he already had—if he hadn’t been drained completely already. Her head whined in agony and she noticed the bruises mottling her skin for the first time, pockmarked amongst still-bleeding cuts in poppies of lurid yellow-blue. Like whoever had killed this man had tried to kill her too, but for some reason, she’d survived. Maybe she’d put up a fight. Maybe she killed them first.
The world tilted upside down, bile rising in her throat. Erica staggered to her knees, mentally running through whatever course of action her painfully throbbing brain would let her consider. She could walk to the nearest town and borrow a phone, but—
—but they’d think she did it. She was alone, with blood on her hands and a dead body next to her. They would find the corpse and slap handcuffs on her before she could even blink, especially with how banged up she was. They wouldn’t listen no matter how many times she insisted she’d tried to save him, especially since she couldn’t even remember it herself. They’d say she fought with him and murdered him in cold blood. And somehow, she couldn’t bear the idea of a murder investigation done on his cadaver—this still-warm, beautiful man, hands pulling and prodding and slicing until there was nothing left of him to throw to the worms beneath the earth.
Erica forced her hands away from him and stumbled to her feet. Part of her wanted to lie down in the grass, wrap her arms around his corpse, and wait for death to take her too. But she knew she had to carry on—if not for herself, for this beautiful stranger, who never had the choice to move forward. Whose killer, for some reason, had left Erica alive instead.
She racked her brain one final time to see if she could scrounge up any more details. When nothing came to mind, she began staggering through the field, the waving grass lapping at her knees.
A tree came into view, thick and sturdy, but Erica couldn’t care about what kind it was. Instead, her gaze caught a small red car at its base, the front bumper embedded so hard into the tree that a dent crunched deep into its trunk.
For some reason, the car sparked the same inkling of familiarity that the man did, and Erica lurched towards it. She could see that the fender was so badly damaged that it was falling off, but—maybe—
Her hand found the key fob in her pocket. She creaked open the door—unlocked, with the driver’s window stuck half-up half-down—and slid into the seat, pressing the key into the ignition. When she turned it, the engine sputtered to life with a creaky hum.
Erica sat there for longer than she probably should have, staring at the key in the ignition and the car that still somehow worked. At the dented tree and the flattened foxgloves around its base, pale lavender stamped over the broken grass. She briefly wondered if that’s how the man had died—if a car had crashed into him—but dismissed the thought as quickly as it had come, because trees didn’t have hands and trees couldn’t carry knives.
Glancing into the rearview mirror, Erica took in her own appearance. She’d place her age in her late twenties, but the bags under her eyes and the fear furrowing her mouth made her look older. She was thin and redheaded and she supposed she could have been called pretty, if it weren’t for the bruises tattooed over her pale skin. She couldn’t help wondering if the stranger had thought of her as pretty before she realised it didn’t matter. Whatever he’d thought, he was dead now, and she still didn’t know who he was.
I’m sorry, she wanted to say, even though there was no one around to hear except the ants and the foxgloves and the corpse she’d just abandoned. The wheel fitted into her hands neatly, as if it was her car. Maybe it really was. The fender crunched as she backed away from the tree, but the wheels rolled and the engine ran, and that was good enough for Erica.
A flash of white filled the corner of her eye. For a moment, she thought it looked like a lady in a nightgown. Maybe it was an angel, come to take away the beautiful stranger’s soul.
The thought of the stranger made her stomach clench. As Erica pulled away, she realised she was leaving him behind. Every fiber of her wanted to turn back—more than she’d ever wanted anything in her life.
–
She checked into the nearest motel she could find. The receptionist was a potbellied man who asked, “What’s the craic, girl?” without even glancing at her, and his gaze instantly shifted to most of the notes she’d found in the pocket of her jeans, skipping over her still bloodstained hands. He didn’t say anything about her appearance or her lack of luggage—probably didn’t even notice it—and for that, Erica was grateful.
You need a hospital, she told herself as she dabbed at her cuts in the mirror and watched the stranger’s blood disappear down the drain. He needs a hospital. Then, she thought: it’s too late for a hospital for him already. And they’ll just arrest you because they think you did it, even though you didn’t.
Or did you?
A flash of something sparked in her mind, and despite how much it made her head hurt, Erica thrust herself into the memory forming in her brain. Forced herself to remember warm arms over her shoulders and a broad body pressed against her and dark curly hair brushing against the nape of her neck. She looked back, and his eyes were brighter than the sky, turned up at the corners as he grabbed her waist and lifted her in the air, twirling her around easily despite her playful shrieks.
I’ll make my famous three-cheese lasagna tonight, he said, setting her down and bending to kiss her cheek. You’ll love it.
She didn’t remember what she said next, but she could hazard a guess: I love everything about you. Because even though she didn’t remember his name yet, or whether they’d been married or simply lovers, she just knew—that she couldn’t have killed the dead man in the field, because she’d loved him. More than her own life.
It scurried back to her in bits and pieces, and for a moment, Erica could almost smell his woody aftershave. Could almost feel his mouth against her skin, grinning against her throat until shivers scuttled down her spine. Could almost believe that he was alive. Just sleeping.
She glanced into the mirror. There were tears in her eyes.
–
He was walking by her side, the breeze raking through his dark curls and tangling it with her long red hair. His hand was woven into hers, and she could feel every callus on his palm, taste the warmth radiating off his skin. They hiked through the knee-high grass, brushing aside foxgloves growing wild over their ankles. The wind was picking up and she had to shout to be heard over it.
“What are we doing here?” she yelled, the breeze carrying away half her words.
“Don’t know!” he laughed back, mouth spreading into a grin so wide it touched his glittering eyes.
“What’s your name?” she called.
Before he could answer, she stepped onto the road. The momentary flash of a car’s headlights bounced straight into her eyes, freezing her in her tracks. One hand pressed over her forehead to shield her gaze from the harsh glare, Erica could barely make out a small red car with a dented fender and the diminutive figure of a blonde woman in the driver’s seat, a white dress wrapped around her shoulders.
Then the car crashed into her, and Erica woke up with a scream halfway out her throat.
She panted in the dark silence of her cramped motel room, breath punched out of her lungs in short, staggered gasps. There was metal on her tongue, and she could almost still feel the crunching of metal embedding itself into her ribs, burnt rubber peeling off her flesh. Running her thumb over her palm, she carefully traced the road map of her veins, almost expecting to find his calloused fingers tattooed over her own, but there was nothing. Nothing at all.
–
Another memory came to her as she stumbled out of the room and onto the balcony—what she supposed could have passed as a balcony. She tried to suck in as much fresh air as she could, but the metallic tang of blood and smoke and death remained stuck in her lungs, permeating through her veins until it leaked into her bloodstream.
I’ll take you to Sweden during the midsummer solstice, the man had promised, spinning her around with one graceful hand. You’re so good at dancing, I’m sure you’ll become the May Queen.
You’ve been watching too much Midsommar, she’d teased.
But you wouldn’t put me in the bear, would you? he’d joked back, and she didn’t remember her reply, but she knew it would have been: no, nay, never. Because she’d loved him. So much it hurt.
She wondered if she had a family who was worried sick about her, calling all the nearest police stations until the coppers searched the earth from end to end. Maybe some friends, back in…wherever she’d come from. Or if her only family had been him, and now he was gone too, leaving her all alone in the world.
Did anyone even know she existed? Would anyone report her missing? Would anyone report him?
Out of the corner of her eye, Erica glimpsed a pale figure in the parking lot below. If she squinted enough, she could make out the form of a woman—a blonde woman in a white dress, barely there for a second before Erica blinked and she was gone. But before she disappeared, Erica managed to make out a blotch of something on her dress—something that looked dark maroon.
Her tongue seemed to stick to the roof of her gunmetal-tinged mouth. The air suddenly felt wrong, like a clock ticking backwards. Erica shivered, but she had nothing to pull over her except her stained T-shirt, almost as scratched up as her limbs were. She’d seen the woman in white before—behind the wheel of a car, crashing into her in her dreams.
–
Left with nothing to entertain her besides her own thoughts, head pounding too much to bear with the TV, Erica let herself wonder again if she’d been the one to kill him. No matter how hard she tried to block it out, the thought still lived in every silence. Every breath. Every glance at the invisible blood she could almost see still clinging to her skin. Escape was futile.
She didn’t remember the knife. But she didn’t remember anything.
Anything except her name, and…him.
He seeped back into her fractured memories like sunlight through shattered glass, and she let him. Clung on to every tiny remembrance of his gleaming eyes and strong arms and beaming smile like a lifeline, because it was all she had left in the world. Him, leaning over to dab whipped cream from her upper lip with his thumb. Him, telling the hostess at her favourite seafood restaurant that he wanted their most private room, because he had the most beautiful girl in the world on his arm and he wanted her all to himself. Him, promising her the stars, the moon, and all the heavens above.
Him, who she couldn’t have murdered. She would rather have killed herself than harm a single hair on his beautiful head.
A scratching noise ebbed through the thin plywood of her door. She froze. Then, stupidly, because she had nothing left now that he was dead (and she’d left him behind, too), she walked over to the door and pulled it open.
Baleful eyes pierced right through her, and the hatred glittering in them almost sent Erica stumbling backwards. The woman in white shook back her blonde hair, throwing one last glance in Erica’s way, before she darted around the corner and was gone once more. A smear of smoke in the midsummer wind. Nothing but a ghost.
Erica stood in silence, pulse hammering in her chest. She could almost convince herself that the woman’s hand was the perfect size for a knife to fit itself into it. A knife that had already been plunged into a man’s heart, and would soon find hers too.
–
The splinters of her head seemed to ebb back in fragments, enough for her to recall that she was twenty-eight years old, she’d originally come from America, and she had two sisters who were both deceased. Erica wept when that memory infiltrated her brain, grief blossoming in her stomach like she had lost them all over again, but it was nothing compared to the agony clinging to every pore of her skin whenever more of the man came back to her. She could feel it everywhere—sadness spilling from beneath her flesh and infesting her tiny motel room, seeping into the walls until it permeated the wallpaper. She wondered what would happen when she checked out and a new person took her place—if they would walk in through the door and instantly fall to their knees, overwhelmed by the anguish saturating the room.
He’d taken her out for her twenty-eighth birthday—but not to a dingy motel like this one, but a real resort, just off the coast of Connemara. I wish we could be alone like this forever, he’d said as he kissed her, her long red hair fanned out across the sheets like a halo. Just you and me against the world, love.
Except he was gone, and it was just her against the world, a ghost rapidly encroaching on the fringes of her sanity in her long white gown. An angel, just like Erica had thought her to be when she’d first seen her, but an angel of death. One who’d turned a man into a corpse and seemed intent on doing the same to Erica regardless of the broken bits of her brain.
All she could see in her mind’s eye were those fiery, hateful eyes, glaring at her like they would gladly pluck her limbs from her body and feed them to the birds. Erica tried to think of what she—or he—had done to anger the woman in white so much, but nothing came except another shockwave of pain.
She wanted to fight. She wanted to fling open her door and run, run, run, until she found the woman in white and her blood-splattered dress, and she wanted to pin her down and choke her until she dissolved into smoke. She wanted to set her alight until there was nothing left of her but ashes to roll a cigarette with. But her head ached, and bruises still swelled over her arms in red-light warnings, and in the loneliness of her motel room, all Erica could do was cry.
–
The Zippo in her hand flickered like a death sentence, a spark of gold at the end of the white-brown stick clutched between her trembling fingers. She didn’t remember being a smoker, but she didn’t remember much of anything. Maybe he—he whose name still escaped her, no matter how hard she tried—was. Maybe the pack of cigs in her back jeans pocket used to be his. Maybe she tried to get him to stop—plucked the box out of his hands and tucked it away for safekeeping. Maybe she’d become what she told him she’d never permit.
Erica sucked in a lungful of thick grey smog, coughing it out almost immediately. The nicotine did nothing to calm her nerves or still her shaking digits. She resisted the urge to snag her thumb over the flint wheel and burn everything to ash, just like the sodden embers of her gaping memory.
She could feel him under her skin, even—she didn’t even know how long it had been. Since he’d been a man instead of a cadaver fit for the morgue.
For a moment, Erica thought she glimpsed the lady in white out of the corner of her eye. She was there for barely a second—a flash of blazing gold and willowy pearl, a gossamer stain in the periphery of her vision. If Erica squinted hard enough, she could almost make out the splatter of crimson on the hem of her dress, half-masked in the cold grey daylight and the silver fog floating over her face, burnt sienna welding her nose and lungs together. Then she was gone, nothing but a spirit in the wind once more.
Erica couldn’t help wondering if he had suffered when he died. If his last conscious thought had been of her, barely inches away but just a notch too far for him to stretch his hand out and touch her. She wondered if the greatest pain he’d felt when he took his last breaths had been the fact that he couldn’t hold her at the end, agony unfurling its crimson petals over the nightingale cage of his ribs until it hadn’t mattered anymore. All for a woman who didn’t even remember his name.
Barely remembered her own, when it came to it.
“Hey!”
She turned. A portly man—the same one who’d snatched her crumpled stack of bills out of her hand when she checked in without even glancing at her face—pointed angrily at the sign above her head. “Girl, you can’t smoke here!”
He was gesturing heatedly, yelling about kicking her out if she didn’t quit immediately—all empty threats; money always talked more than manners. She ignored him. Just angled the fag in her hand over the railing and stubbed it out against the peeling green paint, watching the last of her past crumble away.
–
In the midst of another sleepless night, her second in the motel’s stained, threadbare sheets, a thought came to her: Isaac. Like sawdust and starlight against the bleeding abscess of her brain.
Isaac, whispered every recess of her mind, an embrace against her scabbed limbs. She expected the word to bruise, pockmarking yellow and blue over her scarred, mortal flesh, but it went straight for the jugular, carving its way into her skin until it hit marrow. A strange sort of warmth flooded her chest. Spilled out onto the dishevelled sheets until it pooled on the floor, a scarlet pool of vermillion wine, the same way the man’s—Isaac’s—blood had looked: almost beautiful in the aftermath of the sunglow, dripping down emerald blades in ruby rivulets, stained glass fissures trickling into the bell-shaped heads of the nodding foxgloves.
She remembered him framed by his backyard garden—their garden, for she had loved him so much she could not imagine them living apart—haloed in gold, a violet foxglove stark against his pale skin. Isaac, they’re poisonous, you know, she’d said, and he’d grinned at her with a smile that could light up New York and replied, Only if you’re scared of being poisoned. Then he’d taken her into his arms and kissed her, molding her rose-gold in the wake of the stars.
It was then and there that Erica decided to bury him.
Is that your name? she thought, hugging her pillow to her chest. In the dark, she could almost pretend it was him, with his twinkling eyes and wild dark curls and soft Irish brogue. Is that your name, my beautiful, long-gone lover?
–
She didn’t bother checking out when she left. Just packed up her life—what was left of it, a few crumpled notes and the keys of what she assumed to be her car, nothing remaining in the box of cigarettes—into her pockets and got into her car, the dented fender looking even more bruised in the chilly sleet of day. The motel owner wouldn’t bother chasing after her when he eventually found out she was gone, not when she’d already paid him and her clearing out earlier just meant he had an extra day to scrape out the ash she’d left on the carpet. She’d left her lighter, too, a small token for his trouble. So she got into her car and drove, and drove, and drove, wind scurrying in through the cracked-open window and whipping her copper-red hair around her head. It was a miracle the car hadn’t been stolen.
It didn’t take her long to find the road she’d come from. She’d stopped at the first sign of civilization, after all. When she spotted the tree with the dent in it, a few lone foxgloves trampled around its base, Erica pulled to a stop and got out of the car, not bothering to take the keys out of the ignition. If she was going to bury Isaac, she would have to escape quickly, before anyone saw her with a dead man and thought she’d been the one to off him.
Dread pooled in the bottom of her stomach as she cautiously trekked into the knee-high grass, eyes darting to the road every now and then. She knew it had all been a dream, but there was no erasing how real being hit by that car had felt—all crunching metal and splintered bones and pain, pain, pain. Anxiously, Erica ripped her gaze away from the road and forced herself to look at the field.
The empty field.
The grass was indented flat where Isaac had been, and she could still see a blotch of dark brown splashed across the foliage, but he was gone. He couldn’t have decomposed so fast—she’d only been gone two days, and he was still fresh when she’d first woken up. She glanced around, expecting some animal to descend with Isaac clutched between its jaws—a crow bearing his eyeball, a raccoon gnawing on his arm. But it was too clean. No ripped-apart limbs or glittering bones left to signify that some creature had taken him. Nothing that said he’d even been there at all. Just a splotch of dried blood scattered across the grass, the same one that had dripped from his chest when she turned him over.
No body. No Isaac. No way to give him his final dignity.
Then Erica saw it—a glint of gold buried deep in the patch of flattened foxgloves, gleaming from its amaranthine prison.
She darted over before she could stop herself. The words she’d said to Isaac came back to her for the briefest of moments: they’re poisonous, you know, but his reply drifted into her mind as well—Only if you’re scared of being poisoned—and she had nothing to be scared of anymore, now that the only person she remembered in the world was gone. The only one she knew that she had loved—still did, grief welling in her belly until it threatened to consume her whole. Plunging her hand into the flora, Erica tugged out a man’s leather wallet—and a thin gold chain, a heart pendant drooping from its glimmering links.
The wallet would have his identity in it. A clue to her own, perhaps—if they’d been married, and if her surname was the same as his now. The logical choice. But Erica hadn’t been logical since she’d woken up with the love of her life dead next to her, so she reached for the pendant instead.
The surface was blank, rusted over slightly. Not a fleck of blood on its burnished surface. Erica thought she might have broken down completely if there had been. But it remained empty, and with trembling hands, she cracked it open. The inscription staring up at her was so tiny that she had to squint to make out the words, but once they finally stopped swimming in front of her tired eyes, she froze in her tracks.
To Charlotte, my one and only. From your dearest love, Isaac.
Tears sprung to her eyes. She’d misremembered her own name, but she hadn’t misremembered her love for him, after all—or his love for her.
My name is Charlotte, not Erica, she thought, reaching for his wallet. I loved a man named Isaac, and his murderer let me live. But when Isaac was alive, I was his one and only. I was his dearest love. She tugged the wallet open, desperate to know the surname of the man she loved so greatly, so much she almost wished his killer hadn’t left her behind. A surname she shared—or would have soon, if the locket was to be believed. Her hands fumbled out a few crumpled notes of cash, two credit cards, and a creased print of a picture, wrinkled at the edges. From the image, Isaac’s beautiful face stared at her, as it had in life—dark curly hair grown almost to his shoulders, broad shoulders covered in a thick navy parka, grin reaching his eyes. A woman and two children somewhere between eight to twelve, a boy and a girl, huddled into his sides, their hands wrapped around his arms. The boy was taller than the woman but nowhere near his father’s height, with buzz-cut hair and pale blue overalls. The girl wore a matching blue dress with her blonde locks done up in two ribboned plaits.
The woman was short. The woman was blonde. The woman looked up at Isaac like he was her whole world, as if all the stars in the sky had fallen into her eyes and tumbled down over her cheeks.
The woman was not her.
“He’s not here.”
A dark shadow loomed over her head, and she turned. The woman from the picture in Isaac’s wallet stared down at her with a face like stone, sharp blue eyes stabbing straight through her bones. She realised that she had seen this woman before—lurking around every corner like an angel of death in her long white dress, Isaac’s blood splattered over her clothes. A spirit haunting the recesses of her mind.
“He’s not here,” the woman in white repeated. “I’m sure you thought you’d do him the honour of giving him his last rites, because you cared for him oh so much, but he’s gone. I’ve already buried him.”
She flailed for words, but all that came out of her mouth was a high, stuttering: “I’m…Charlotte?”
“No!” the woman snarled, her pretty face contorting into the angel of death who’d killed Isaac and was now hunting her down. “I am.”
Something cracked open in her chest.
No, she thought, heart ramming a sledgehammer into her ribs. She wrapped her fingers tighter around the locket in her hand, thumb tracing the delicate inscription within it. To Charlotte, my one and only. From your dearest love, Isaac. She had to be Charlotte, because she was Isaac’s one and only, and he’d loved her to the day he died, and she’d loved him too—loved him even now, with the nodding foxgloves swaying over where his body had been and the woman who’d killed him looming in the grass. She was his one and only, and he was her dearest love.
“Wake up, Erica,” the woman in white growled. “I am Charlotte. And you may have loved Isaac, but he never loved you.”
“No,” she squeaked, and her voice sounded small and tinny, even to her own ears. “No. He loved me. More than anyone else in the world.” How could he not, when he was the only thing that remained in her memory, when the sensation of his hands on her skin burned brighter than the midsummer sun, when she could hear nothing but the way he laughed like a song? How could he not, when she remembered loving him? How could he not, when the proof of his adoration was in his locket, threatening to fall from her shaking hands?
“I wasn’t his one and only, no matter what’s written on the locket,” the woman said, glancing pointedly at the necklace in Erica’s trembling grasp. “Because he had you as a sweet little thing on the side, despite the fact that he was my husband.”
“He was mine,” Erica whispered.
“He was never yours!” the woman barked. “You were just his co-worker!” She sucked in a deep breath, nostrils flaring with anger. “He strung both of us along until I found out about his affair with you, and that was when he finally told you he was married.”
“No,” Erica breathed, but it felt weak, like a bud of denial lodged deep in her throat. “No. It’s not true. He wasn’t married. He loved me.”
“He never loved you. He told you as much when he broke up with you, because he already had me and our two children. But you couldn’t let him go, could you?”
Panic flashed in Erica’s mind, so agonising all she could do was sit there, surrounded by the waving foxgloves and the emerald-green grass, as if her legs had been cut out from beneath her and she’d been rooted in place. Memories flashed back to her in broken little fragments, how he’d held both her hands in his larger palms and said, soft and honeyed: I like you, Erica, but my wife knows. How he’d smiled that same grin at her, but it had been sad that time, and she’d taken in his broad shoulders and twinkling eyes and dark curly hair and thought about how much she loved him as he whispered: This has to end.
“It was you all along, you know.” The woman seemed so much taller now, her white dress billowing out around her as she snarled at Erica like a caged animal. “I was suspicious of him carrying on with you, so I followed him out, just in time to see you stabbing him in the chest.”
“No,” Erica whimpered, as if repeating it would make it true. “No. I couldn’t have killed him. I loved him. I loved him more than anything.”
“So you couldn’t let me keep him.” A bitter laugh rasped from the woman’s throat, almost guttural. It reminded her of the wind wailing through the moors, a banshee in the night. “I saw you, Erica. I saw you kill him.”
No, Erica wanted to scream, but the word died on her tongue. Her head spun, and all she could see was the knife in her hand as she plunged it into Isaac’s chest over and over again, blood spurting out around the handle, gurgling from his soft pink lips. How he fell down onto the grass like a rag doll, hands clasping themselves desperately over the wound in his torso, a futile attempt to stem the flow. How he begged for his life: Erica, I’m sorry, please, call an ambulance, I have a son, a daughter, I have Charlotte—
How he looked at her like he despised her before he took his final breaths, and how she clambered into her car afterwards and drove it straight into the nearest tree.
“I thought about killing you,” Charlotte said, her voice tight with rage. “But after you rammed yourself into that tree, you looked dead enough when I pulled you out, so I left you there. I didn’t have the courage to get rid of you then, even when you woke up. I wanted you to see what you had done.”
“No,” Erica echoed, finally finding her voice. The word seemed to scratch her throat raw, flaying its way through her lungs until her skin peeled away from the base of her spine. “No. It’s—it’s all a mistake—”
Charlotte chuckled sharply. “There is no mistake, Erica. The only mistake I made was leaving you alive in the first place, when you took my husband and the father of my children away from me. And that’s a mistake I’ve regretted ever since Isaac died, which is why I’ve been following you around.” She stepped forward, and Erica caught her first glimpse of the knife in Charlotte’s hand, the cold grey sun glinting off its razor-sharp blade. “But I won’t make that mistake twice.”
Then she lifted both hands above her head, the knife so tight in her grasp that her knuckles blazed white, and swung it down.
When Erica finally collapsed into the grass, it didn’t hurt. All she felt was cold, and numb, and like her heart had been wrenched out of its chest. Isaac’s locket was still clasped in the palm of her hand, so warm she could almost believe it had fused together with her bones. She stretched her arm out weakly, cupping the bell-shaped head of the nearest foxglove between her trembling fingers. Only if you’re scared of being poisoned, Isaac had said, and she wasn’t scared. She wasn’t scared of anything anymore. She watched crimson drip down her clothes and into the knee-high grass, mingling with the splotches of Isaac left behind, and she wondered what it would be like to be together with him at last.
Written By: Amberlyn
Edited By: Hoe Yan
