Chapters (58)
- Cover
- Dedication
- One
- Two
- Three
- Four
- Five
- Six
- Seven
- Eight
- Nine
- Ten
- Eleven
- Twelve
- Thirteen
- Fourteen
- Fifteen
- Sixteen
- Seventeen
- Eighteen
- Nineteen
- Twenty
- Twenty-one
- Twenty-two
- Twenty-three
- Twenty-four
- Twenty-five
- Twenty-six
- Twenty-seven
- Twenty-eight
- Twenty-nine
- Thirty
- Thirty-one
- Thirty-two
- Thirty-three
- Thirty-four
- Thirty-five
- Thirty-six
- Thirty-seven
- Thirty-eight
- Thirty-nine
- Forty
- Forty-one
- Forty-two
- Forty-three
- Forty-four
- Forty-five
- Forty-six
- Forty-seven
- Forty-eight
- Forty-nine
- Fifty
- Fifty-one
- Acknowledgements
- An Eastbourne Murder Mystery
- Canelo Crime
- About the Author
- Also by Sheila Bugler
She chose a record and sat back down. Pushing her laptop to one side, she reached for the photo album on the table in front of her. With McCormack in the background, singing about his love down by the Salley Gardens, Emer flicked through the pages, looking at the different snapshot moments from her family’s life. Despite being a rubbish mother, Ursula had loved taking photos of her children. Emer was still young when she’d worked out the photos were a pretence – her mother’s way of trying to demonstrate she was an adequate and loving parent.
The first few pages contained photos from ‘before’ – when Emer still had a sister who she loved and who’d loved her back. She was already familiar with all these photos. She’d scanned the images and stored them on her laptop so she could see them whenever she wanted to. But looking at them on a screen was never quite the same as looking at the print versions of the images.
Too quickly, these pages ended, replaced by the rest of her life – the lonely, unhappy time that had begun the day Kitty drowned and had never really ended. Looking at her face in the photos, Emer imagined she could see the changes. A sadness behind the eyes and a hardness around the lips that weren’t evident in the earlier photos.
She flicked back and forth through the pages, spending longer each time on the earlier pages and the photos of Kitty. On one page, there was a space where someone had removed a photo. Emer rubbed the blank rectangle where the photo should be, trying to remember what had been there. But the image wouldn’t come to her, and after a moment she gave up and turned to the next page.
She lifted her glass of wine, then put it back down again without drinking from it. She was tired of being like this. Tired of feeling crappy all the time, of messing up every good thing that ever happened to her. Tired of holding on to the past and refusing to move on with her life. She’d messed things up with Nikki, but there was still time to fix it if she really wanted. First thing tomorrow, she would call their family doctor and ask him to refer her for counselling.
The decision triggered an unfamiliar surge of optimism. She could do this. Get sober, get sorted, get Nikki back. Her very own three-step programme to recovery. But she could only do if she accepted, once and for all, that Kitty was gone.