Chapters (39)
- Cover
- Title
- Author’s Note
- Glossary
- 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
- Acknowledgments
Faye turned and made her way through the reeds back towards the trail.
Twenty
Twenty
After hours of insomnia the night before, Clare had fallen asleep to the sound of Faye departing. She’d closed her eyes and listened to the leaves crunching and twigs breaking underfoot, and, when Faye reached the path, she had recognised the sound of boots on saturated earth. The fading thuds soothed her. She closed her eyes. Faye would find help while she slept.
The forest was alive when she awoke hours later. It was as if the birds were celebrating the warmth of the sun as it fought its way through the clouds. Clare looked out of the shelter, imagining the rays on her body. She was cold and her skin felt clammy. Faye had insisted she shouldn’t move, but she longed to get warm and wondered if she would be up to dragging herself out of the shade. As she leaned forward, pain shot through her lower chest, erupting into a cough, which exacerbated the agony. She sat back, breathing hard, and wiped her mouth. Her fingers came away coated with frothy white spit, which was tinged with red. Her heart was racing, her breathing wheezy, and her head spun.
Was this it? Was she dying? Would she be alone when it happened? Was this what Gran meant when she said, “We come into the world alone and we leave alone”? If it was, Clare wasn’t ready. It wasn’t that she couldn’t be alone—she’d grown accustomed to that—but she wasn’t ready to die.
After breaking up with Will, Clare had quickly learned how to self-isolate. It was essential. She couldn’t bear the solicitous questions and pitying glances. She’d rather be labelled the “unfriendly, selfish girl” than the “pathetic one with the problem.” If she timed her comings and goings right, she was able to avoid most of the pitying looks. She ignored the knocks at her door until they stopped completely. Clare ran before anyone else was awake in morning and again at twilight. She was the first or last to enter the lecture hall, kept her head down when she made her way across campus and spent all other hours in her room or in the remotest nook of the library. She kept her visits to the dining room to a minimum by sneaking out handfuls of fruit, which she stored in her room and nibbled on for days, cutting it into tiny pieces and chewing every morsel a hundred times. She bought her own scale so that she no longer needed to go to the gym to weigh herself every Monday.
After a while, she felt invisible. One morning, as the light brightened the horizon and Clare reached the seven kilometre point of her run, she passed two women walking from the taxi rank towards the centre of town.