The idea horrifies me.
It’s too wild.
Too uncontrollable.
I don’t want to be set loose.
I return my attention to Nick, and don’t want to escape him.
Wasit just an act earlier when he was looking at me the way he was?
I wish he’d look at me again so I could be sure, but he’s been descended on by Ines, with her drops, and Jeff, who’s slapping him on the back.
I turn from him, turn from them all, and catch Ana’s thumbs up from over by the camera. She really is happy.
Everyone’s so happy.
I want to be, too.
All I want is to be happy.
But I’m just so, soscared.
Sad, too, broken-hearted actually, for Iris and Robbie. Because revelatory as it was to be swept up in their elation just now – to be immersed, however fleetingly, in the delirium of their love story, rather than feeling so battered by my own – it’s beyond awful to remember that their story, their beautiful story, ended so very quickly.
And although I don’t know how that happened, what I feel suddenly quite certain of, with a clarity that spikes through my panic, fear and grief, is that Imogen’s version of events is, most definitively, wrong.
Iris couldn’t have been responsible for them all dying.
I won’t believe it.
Not of her.
Not of the personI just felt.
I bite the insides of my cheeks, and don’t want any of them to have died at all.
They must have, though.
They really all must have.
Yet, as my mind moves back outside, to the dark woods, I picture Iris and Robbie together, full of fragile hope intheir old cottage – not as it is now, but as it must have been then – and cannot make peace with the idea that they simply vanished.
I can’t accept the defeatism of Imogen’s author’s note that the truth about what happened belongs to them,and them alone.
Because it surely has to be lurkingsomewherestill, doesn’t it?
I stand straighter.
I’m right. I know I’m right.
Truth doesn’t vanish.
It just gets hidden.
And, in a rush, it comes to me how much I want to uncover this truth.
I don’t pause to unpick my motive, or consider whether it’s about clearing Iris’s name, or my own curiosity, or simple desperation for another of Mum’s golden tickets: a distraction, any distraction, from everything else I’m too terrified to think about. I just know that doing this will help me, because I’ll have no peace until I’ve uncovered what really happened to Iris, Robbie, and the rest ofMabel’s Fury’s crew.
