The days drag by, each one feeling like a week, even though it’s only been forty-eight hours since my grand revelation to Louise. I ache from so much lying still, but watch and learn is all I can do. I hide in my room when David gets home, pleading headaches or tiredness, and he barely speaks, instead nodding with thinly veiled relief. I leave him food in the fridge that he sometimes nibbles on but doesn’t eat, as if he thinks maybe it’s poisoned or contaminated in some way. I should care more that he’s not interested in spending time with me, but I’m so much in Louise’s life that if he did it would be a hindrance.
I wish he’d work later, which is something I’ve never wanted before. But I’m waiting for one moment. The moment when I can turn everything on its head. I can’t miss it.
What if David decides he wants my attention at the moment when I need to be there? What then? I want to know when all the pieces of the puzzle have been thrown up in the air.
I lock the bedroom door just in case, but he doesn’t knock. He hasn’t been back to her either, which is a relief. I’ve needed them apart, and that has worked. I doubt that right now Louise would even open the door to him. Not now that she’s sent that letter. And now, after our sneaky texts of late last night, she has filled me with joy even though she doesn’t realise it. I know she’s feeling guilty about the letter she doesn’t know I know she’s sent. Her accusations about David. When I texted her that he was being very attentive and maybe I was over-thinking it all and we should forget it, she changed the subject. People always change the subject when they feel bad about something. But this time she changed the subject to mention her dreams. She told me about the weird second door, and how she found herself floating above her body in the sitting room for a moment. How she hadn’t been asleep, but trying to shift a headache with some deep breathing, and how it just happened.
Although that left me bursting with excitement, I replied that it had never happened to me, but I’ve been taking sleeping pills so I’m not even going through the first door at the moment. I tell her I’m enjoying the oblivion. The feeling of nothingness. Of non-existence. I text her that sometimes I think I’d like to be nothing. I wonder how she felt reading those words. A hint of what’s possibly to come. Words to haunt her later.
She ended our text chat after that when I mentioned David again. She feels like she’s betrayed me twice now, I imagine. She knows poor, fragile Adele wouldn’t want her secrets aired to the world. Not when dangerous David is in the house. But still, she thinks she’s strong enough for both of us. She thinks she knows best. I wonder whether the police will come before or after her doubts set in, or if they’ll come at all. I half expect the doorbell to go at any moment, even though I know it will take the police longer than the time passed to get their shit together if they decide to take her letter seriously. Perhaps they will just dismiss it. Perhaps I should send a letter of my own. It’s a deliciously dark thought, but I decide against it for now. I’ll see how things play out.
Secrets, secrets, secrets. People are filled to the brim with them if you look closely. Louise is collecting several of her own, this letter being the most recent. I feel a slight betrayal that she hasn’t told me about it. That she hasn’t considered my feelings in her actions when she’s supposed to be my best friend, but I keep my irritation in check. She’s doing exactly what I want from her, after all.
My feelings don’t really matter any more, just like maintaining my figure and fitness don’t matter any more.
After all, what’s the point? I’m going to be dead soon.
47
LOUISE