Someone would find her clothes and walking boots at the top of the cliff and know she had jumped. There would be no need to scour the beach for tatters of fabric tangled with the seaweed. Someone would find the suicide note tucked in her pocket, the paper stained with dark splotches from stray tears, the words scrawled on the page like the writing of a child. No one would need to find the body she had left behind, dressed in nothing but underwear and bloated skin. The sea would take care of that.

Max ran around the green behind her chasing rabbits, his tail wagging and wet with dew.

He will go on helping people, she thought. He will forget me.

Just the night before, she had stood in the very same spot, wondering if it would be better to wait for the tide to go out so she could fall onto the beach and break her spine in one quick hit, or leap then and there for the waves to slam her against the cliff face and thrash the life from her bones. But she hadn’t found the courage; she had stood there for hours picking at the skin around her nails until her fingers bled.

The smell of the sea brought with it memories of better times. A day at the beach with her adoptive mother and sister eating soggy sandwiches speckled with sand; playing on the beach with her niece and nephew with her then husband by her side, his voice filled with hope at the thought of children of their own, children she would never give him. She shook her head.

Don’t think of them.

Her mother, the woman who had found her and raised her as her own, would never forgive her. The wail of the wind began to sound like distant screams. Maybe that was what her mother would sound like when she learned her daughter was dead. She clenched her eyes shut and covered her ears.

‘Please stop,’ she whispered.

Her ex-husband’s voice seeped in, stalking the salty breeze, whispering the words she would never forget: I’ll never stop loving you.

Two tears shot simultaneously down her cheeks.

‘LIAR!’

She shouted the word to the wind until her throat burned.

Dane had been the start of it all. He had been the one to claw up that voice again, the voice that whispered of death and how easy it would be. She had existed for two long years, isolated, single and friendless, but loneliness had finally got the better of her. To successfully quieten the voice inside her head, she had to die.

Max’s bark echoed over the barren clifftop. If she turned, he would run towards her and make her give up. She couldn’t give in to the fear. Not again.

‘Max, go away!’