Heathcliff now owned Thrushcross Grange as well as Wuthering Heights. It brought him no joy. His two great enemies, Hindley and Edgar, were dead and he had full possession of their property. But still he had no relief. The more he’d fed his desire for revenge, the greater it had grown. And Edgar’s blood flowing in my daughter’s veins and Hindley’s blood in Hareton’s only made it worse. Heathcliff was determined to crush them both too.

He would have done so. My daughter was a prisoner at the Heights, and Hareton Heathcliff’s slave. Heathcliff would have reduced them both to beggary and after that he’d have taken a pickaxe and smashed both houses to the ground stone by stone. Yet still his vengeful appetite would not have been sated.

But then a passing stranger was caught out in a storm and forced to take shelter at Wuthering Heights. The stranger lay in my bed, he read my books, he spoke aloud the names I had scratched into the paint on the window ledge.

Catherine, Catherine, Catherine.

He repeated my name over and over again until the air swarmed with Catherines.

His incantation gave me form. The passing stranger saw the ghost of a child lost and wandering on the moor these last twenty years. That passing stranger gave Heathcliff proof of my continued existence.

It forced a crack in that great wall of Heathcliff’s hatred, and I slipped through.

Perhaps it was only that. Or perhaps it was also that the two young people Heathcliff was bent on destroying began slowly but surely to fall in love. Despite him, and against all odds, Hareton and my daughter made a heaven out of hell. Something different was in the air – a softness, a mutual joy. And it was so strong it began to seep into Heathcliff’s bones and stir something in his heart.

Heathcliff took long walks on the moor. He visited all our places. He swam in the beck and lay in the long grass looking up at the sky. And one night he came home and saw Hareton and my daughter by the fire, heads close together, laughing. The sound carried Heathcliff back to a time when he and I laughed over something, nothing, anything. A time when we laughed until we were breathless and so weak we could hardly stand.

As they looked up at him, Heathcliff did not see Edgar in my daughter or Hindley in Hareton. He saw my eyes looking out from both their faces.

“Look at them, Heathcliff,” I said. “They are how we could have been. How we should have been. How we could be still if you would only leave them be. Will you not come to me now, my love?”

And Heathcliff, my Heathcliff, turned.

He reached out his hand and said, “Cathy!”