All that time. All that time I loved him, when he was sitting in the pub opposite me, or up on the stage doing a bad Def Leppard tribute, or roaming the earth, a piece of my heart tucked in the pocket of his fisherman’s hat that he didn’t even know was there … and now I know he loves me too. Loved me. And I believe him. I want to love and be loved, and I believe what he has told me. I’d always thought he was too perfect for me, too handsome, too brilliant, too lovely. That I was too ugly, too dull and too noxious for him. But it seems he loves me anyway. Maybe ugly, dull and noxious are things he really likes. Or maybe I am not those things at all.

Maybe I have never been.

I’m at arch twenty-one. What if I never see him again? What if I can’t get help in time? I can’t be too late; it can’t be too late for Kemp and me, can it, not now I realize I am loveable after all? Loveable …! I would laugh, if I wasn’t in this awful pitch-black gulley of a reservoir. I am loveable! Prue Alberta is loveable! I am loveable despite my birthmark, and every bad experience I’ve had in my life. Kemp loves me anyway. Is it because these things are part of me? Is it because they are me? None of them have ever been my fault, I acknowledge that now. Nothing has been my fault. Kemp loves me, and Dad does, and Angela and Mum may too, after all, if I decide to let them. I am worth something. I am good enough. We are all good enough. And I am goddam loveable. What a fantastic word. I may get it printed on a T-shirt and wear it around London.

Arch twenty-two. Thank goodness I know the number of them. Thank goodness for Dad and his architectural brain. I keep one foot trudging in front of the other. Wading through the water, crossing each threshold. And I just keep counting. Counting all the good things in my life and all the things I have to do. I have to get to the hatch, open it up and open up my future. I have to create memories instead of shutting myself away. I have to not simply survive but live. Live for me; live for Philippa and all the people who could not find a way forward. Dad and I will both live. We’ll do exciting, brilliant things together and we won’t sit in those chairs any more – I might just burn the damn things!