At first I can’t makes sense of what it is I’m looking at. The bedroom is small, but neat, with pine walls and a big double bed with a white padded headboard and white bedsheets, gathered into twisted piles. There’s blood on the bed, as well as traces of it on the floor, half cleaned up with a big pile of bath towels. The door nudged against these when I tried to push it open. The bedsheets are gathered in a mound on the bed, and I give them a little tug to make sure she isn’t under them, though there is nothing there, only some streaky, brown bloodstains. I push a large cupboard open with my foot but there is nothing but towels and sheets and a couple of ski jackets inside it.

There is no sign of her but I think about the empty gun cabinet in the vestibule; whoever has killed or injured Leah is armed and still on the loose.

‘Jesus,’ I whisper. I’m about to turn around and leave the room when I notice something sticking out from under one of the pillows. I unfold it and recognize Leah’s handwriting from the note she pressed into my hand in our last session. I read it, and it’s instantly clear who killed Leah Iverson.

44

Kristina

It wasn’t going to be like this.

I’ve fought and fought so hard to find a way to be me. To be someone else. To be anyone at all. But I can’t. Even my own child couldn’t bear to remain inside me. And I can’t do this. I can’t bear it anymore because the thing is I just don’t get any breaks I don’t get a breather or a break or just peace it never ever stops. It’s like I’m roadkill, ripped open and exposed and bleeding to death in the road and my dark thoughts are vultures, feasting before my pebble-sized racoon heart has even stopped beating. The thoughts the images the words the pain and the endless black aloneness which is different from loneliness because it isn’t a perception, it’s a statement of fact. The only time it ever stopped was when I tried to be different, to undo me, and become someone else, someone sane and beautiful and whole and worthy but no one is really like that, even if it looks like it; the shiny perfection we see is just another symptom of the darkness inside isn’t it and anyway we can’t ever be anyone other than who we are, can we – not really

I felt the exact moment when the baby died

It was like the flip of the smallest switch

I knew it even if I couldn’t bear to know it

Lights out