He bends to give me a last kiss, then dedicates himself to the task more fully than expected, lingering until Rowena clears her throat and Roald laughs.
“See you later.”
“You will.”
He jogs backwards to the changing rooms, nearly clocking himself one on a low hanging beam.
Roald arches his eyebrow at me, whispering to Rowena, “Hashtag, relationship goals.”
I roll my eyes, and give her a parting kiss on her cheek, then hurry out to my car. It’s cold enough that my breath is visible, the nights so long and the days so cloudy, I’ve forgotten the entire concept of sunlight.
In town, I circle around the parking building, not wanting to leave my car parked on the street. I reach the late-night café where a jazz band is tuning up, ordering a latte with so many trimmings that when it’s delivered, I can barely see my drink.
I’m halfway through the milky coffee when Rory Albertson and Danielle Munn arrive in tandem. They’re a few minutes late and I lay my palms on the table, breathing deeply with my eyes shuttered while I reign in the panic that wants to erupt.
“Hey,” Danielle greets me, taking her seat and not saying anything further while Rory sorts his drink.
We’ve met enough times that she knows my patterns, knows that I’m not great at talking, knows that I’ll shift in my seat a dozen times a minute, trying to find a spot where I can’t feel those prickles across my back.
The pair are lawyers with a survivor network I reached out to a few months after the fire. While the furore of arrests and releases and accusations was still ongoing. The ‘will they, won’t they’ collection of charges that was forever swirling across the news.
On our side, Seb and I soon came out as ‘they won’t.’ It’s helpful to have a famous barrister’s son in your corner.
Even more helpful to have a clutch of witnesses who disappeared off the scene without a trace and wouldn’t talk even if they were located by police.
Marnie has been held on charges—trafficking, grooming, kidnap. Her alcohol and drug dependency cause problems. Despite her tight lips, the case continues to work its way through the courts.
I try not to obsess about it. Try to push it far from my mind. The thought of getting into a witness box, even if it’s by video-link, even if my identity is shielded, is enough to cause a panic attack.
I’ll do it if I need to. I pray each day her lawyer will convince her to plead guilty, so I won’t.
Allain’s death closed a chapter but sometimes it also feels like he gave everyone a convenient bogeyman. Maxwell paid a high price, but there are many others who willingly participated in the same crimes and got away with it.
When Richard came out with his testimony, blaming Allain for the attack on Maxwell, I supported his story, still worried that Seb would be stolen away from me. Add that to his lost ear and I could live with it.
And that’s fine for him. He’s a known associate. Even without charges, no one will let him near a little girl again. Not now, not in the future.
For everyone else, it didn’t feel enough. Not with the police keen to be done with the whole sorry business.
That’s why every couple of weeks, as often as I can stand, I meet with this pair and talk about the people I remember.
For every name I recollect, there are another two or three I can’t. Others I can barely describe. Situations that sound so fantastical that I sometimes wonder if I’m inventing it all for attention like the social media commentators say.
The process is painful.
Every time I think I’m getting a handle on what I went through, the anxiety and sense of worthlessness will drag me down.
A voice in my head is always ready to tell me it doesn’t matter, I don’t matter. If I hadn’t seen other girls, other women in the news, in the media, going through the same thing, I don’t know that I’d find the strength.
I use them as my role models, trying to believe that one day I might be brave enough to truly come forward, to use my face and my name as I tell my story, to provide that service to another struggling girl in turn.
But when the hopelessness surfaces, I use my notebooks to drive them back. The ones where I write every positive thing that happens. A reminder for when I can’t imagine ever having a happy thought or a good day, that I’ve had plenty.
That they will come again.
A woman in a hospital waiting room once explained to me that humans are wired for survival. As a result, we memorise with crystal clarity all the bad things we encounter because they’re the events that increase our chances of making it through to another day.
We don’t automatically categorise each piece of good news, each celebration. We have to train ourselves to even notice them, we’re so geared to only recall the bad.
