Keep My Secrets by Elena Wilkes (large ebook reader .txt) 📗

she gave her lots of smiling answers. Martin had sent letters, she was told. ‘Burn them,’ she’d replied. Jude was happy with that. Everyone was happy, apart from her.

She feels the mask of depression tightening behind her eyes. The time gaps between the contact meetings got longer; there were always reasons and excuses to soften the blow, but she knew what was coming. Her baby was being taken away from her, but the truth was she’d never been hers from the start.

She drops the mitten back into the box, her stomach hollowing out with grief and she bends double suddenly, her breath suddenly sucked away.

She needs to leave the memories alone.

The realisation comes like a shaft of light.

Leave her alone for good. Do what Alex is asking her to do: pack everything up and move to the middle of nowhere – start again, have a baby. The thought makes her heart race. Could she do that? To mend her marriage? She would be giving him not only a new start, but the possibility of a new family. Replace the old with the new: the past for the future. Her whole being rebels. She feels dizzy with the thought of it, but she holds on tight.

She could do that.

She could.

Straightening up, she looks at the box in her hands. All these things – these letters, this baby stuff – these things are the real ghosts. They are dead things. What’s the point in her turning them over and over in her hands like dirt from a grave? Chloe isn’t this tiny baby anymore; she’s a fifteen-year-old girl on the cusp of womanhood. And Martin Jarvis is a name on a prison discharge list, one of the many hundreds of men who walk through those gates, the mess and the pain and the agony they’ve caused floating away with the free air they’re now breathing – ready to inflict their misery all over again.

Only he’s not going to do it to her.

Not anymore.

Gathering the box together, she goes into her office and kneels beneath the desk. Prising open the board at the back, she drags out the hidden envelope and then takes the whole bundle downstairs to the Rayburn where she opens the fire door. She pauses for a moment, weighing the things in her hands, feeling the searing heat radiating from the stove as the wood crackles. She knows this is destroying a part of herself that has been an open wound for the last fifteen years. She needs to heal; it’s the only way, and this is all part of her penance.

Wavering for a moment, she pulls out one of the letters from its envelope.

I miss you.

She lets the piece of paper fall from her fingers. A quick spool of smoke curls up and then a lick of bright flame blackens the papery edge and the words melt one by one.

We were meant to walk through this life together and never be apart

The second note lands on top of the charred flakes and is consumed quietly as though it had never been there.

A great gulf of sadness threatens to consume her too. She could sink to her knees right now as she watches that seventeen-year-old self, who was so trusting, who was so in love and so vulnerable, go up in smoke with his words.

I’m waiting for you Frankie

Each piece gets fed into the flames, one by one. She feels a track of something running down her neck and only then realises she’s crying. She rubs her nose with the back of her hand, sobbing her grief into every message that she’s letting go. He dirtied everything they had. He soiled her; ground her into the muck with the heel of his shoe and left her there. So why couldn’t he just leave her be now? Why did he have to drag her back into all this? Hadn’t he destroyed enough? The terrible night of Charlotte’s death had murdered something inside her too.

A key rattles. There are voices and her head snaps round.

Alex.

In a heartbeat she’s closed the stove and stuffed the remainder of the notes into the shoebox, pushing the whole lot under the dresser. She turns to find him standing in the doorway. He’s clearly been laughing; as he sees her, his smile drops. ‘Oh! You just coming in or going out again?’ He looks her up and down and she realises she’s still wearing her coat. There’s a curtness in his tone. She looks back at him.

‘Oh yeah.’ She scrubs at her face. ‘A bit of both… and neither.’ She attempts to make light of it.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘Oh, just worrying about this work thing, that’s all.’ She brushes the tears away, realising that there’s a figure behind him waiting in the hallway.

‘You’ve got a guest! Great! Hang on, let me get out of your way.’

She ducks to squeeze past him as Alex crosses her path, walking into the kitchen.

‘Come through! Come through! Cup of tea, mate?’ he calls over his shoulder. ‘Or maybe…’ His voice fades into background noise. She doesn’t hear the rest of the sentence, because her entire body has lurched with a shock as powerful as a bolt of lightning. She stumbles back.

‘Where’s she gone?’ Alex’s voice rings out and she manages to keep herself in one piece by pressing her back to the wall.

‘Ah, this is Martin.’ Alex holds out a palm of introduction. ‘From the community centre.’

‘You must be Frankie.’ Martin stands there in front of her, his expression inscrutable. Her seventeen-year-old self freezes in that instant; the years fall away, time spins backwards, and there she is and there he is and nothing else exists.

‘Alex has told me a lot about you.’

She hears the words and watches his mouth moving. His face is different but his eyes: his eyes look straight into her soul.

Chapter Twenty-Two

She doesn’t know how she got out of that hallway.

Martin’s eyes had bored into her as he walked past and through into the kitchen. Alex was