Stories are my life force, my way of coping with all the shit this world throws at you. But did I ever let her choose for herself?

She needs to start again, but I am afraid of how she is going to be able to cope without me. If I have done enough to make her see just how capable, how brilliant, she is. I want to be able to show her, make her understand the risks you have to take if you are ever going to be happy.

There is one possibility. But I don’t know if it’s too much. Or if I have the energy to make it happen. I must, I owe her that much.

Come what may, this is the life I have lived. This is what I am choosing to leave behind, for Emily. This has been me, Catriona Mairi Robinson, 71, a woman who has had time to count all the blessings I have been so very lucky to have.

CMR

22

PHOENIX

Phoenix

Emily was back where it all ended, where it all began. Next to a lake, with nothing but the birds for company, she sat, thinking about all the people she had met, and all the places she had traveled, the fears, the demons faced along the way.

She folded up her grandmother’s words, placed them safely inside her pocket and allowed herself to cry. To really cry. For each of those tears to represent a piece of her heart that had been broken, been existing in a state of fear, for far too long. To mourn the death of her parents, her grandmother, the life she was too afraid to embrace.

She cried for the little girl who once was, whose life became fractured in a split second by a cruel twist of fate that changed everything, because time wasn’t something you could grasp onto, it could only ever be understood when there wasn’t any of it left.

Her spine curled over, waves of sorrow flowing up and down her back as she sobbed until there was nothing left inside to come out.

“Emily?”

Her head snapped up. She watched him approach and allowed him to sit next to her, curl his arm around and draw her close. The nearness of him made her cry all over again.

“It’s okay,” Tyler whispered against her hair. “It’s okay.”

“No, it’s not okay.” She shook her head, saw streaks of wet on his shirt. “I’ve wasted so much time. I’ve spent years stuck in the past, and for what?”

“You nearly died, Em. You were a girl who had her body broken in two, not to mention the psychological impact the accident must have had on you.”

“All I did was hide.”

“All you did was survive.”

“What was the point of it all, if I can only ever draw what she wrote?”

“I think you did a lot more than that.”