Life is simply too short to live it less perfectly than it could be lived.
There’s a kind of purity to a relationship unencumbered by convention, a sense of simplicity and freedom.
That was Emma—she’d have enjoyed knowing she had something like that, something that could blow her whole fucking life and mine apart if it came out. Her little bit of power.
But one day, when Toby is old enough, I will take down a shoe box from a shelf where it is kept, and I will tell him again the story of his sister, Isabel Margaret Cavendish, the girl who came before.
But I know he loves me. I know he needs our games, that they answer some deep-seated hunger in him.
Love flows from me into him, and his blue eyes crinkle, huge and happy. Such a smiley baby. The midwife says it can’t be a real smile, not yet, just some passing gas or a random quiver of his lip, but I know she’s wrong.
Sometimes it’s as if I can shrink away to nothing. Sometimes I feel as pure and perfect as a ghost. The hunger, the headaches, the dizziness—these are the only things that are real.
I know it must look odd, given that I didn’t even know Emma. But it seems to me that almost no one really knew her. Everyone I speak to has a different version of what she was like.
I will take what I can from Edward. And then I will let them fade into history, all the characters in this drama. Emma Matthews and the men who loved her, who became obsessed with her. They’re not important to us now.
We’re all connected now, I think as I send it off into cyberspace. Everyone and everything.
I feel a thrill of excitement at this first tiny glimpse of self-revelation, of intimacy.
All these men who loved Emma, I think. For all her problems, men were fixated on her. Will anyone ever feel like that about me?