Or it was.
The plaster I’d put over the wound that had been left after she died came off today. There’s a scar there, one that might fade but it’ll never go.
I was tormented with the idea that she’d taken her own life. To bike along that path even when the weather was fine was madness. To do that in a storm was suicidal. I’d thought about how she’d been desperate to finish her book, how she’d been upset over the end of a relationship – although she never gave me details – and how she’d given things away. We both wrote about death, mainly murder. We’d had conversations over dinner about possible plots in stories and ways someone could meet their ending. I didn’t understand why she would’ve chosen to go out that night.
But Ivy was wild, like the coroner said. She’d bungee jumped, skydived, skied down black runs when there were weather warnings, swam with sharks and things she’d never told me because to her they’d been minor.
It was an accident. She hadn’t intended to die. She hadn’t wanted to leave us.
I’d kind of reached the point before the hearing of thinking that way because I wanted to. I wanted it to be an accident and now someone who was impartial, who read through her correspondence and messages and had an insight into her life (that would be different to mine or yours) has confirmed it.
So today I read your letters. I should’ve done this sooner, but I couldn’t.
Ivy loved Puffin Bay which was why she stayed longer than she intended. She was planning to stay until after the following Christmas, writing another book and working on another project that she hadn’t discussed. I think small town life was an escape for her, although she missed you, but in a different way because you weren’t in one place.
I think she did have a crush on Finn, not that he ever noticed, because Finn never noticed anything like that, and then there was Ruby. She told me about a relationship she’d had and it’d ended badly and she told me about you and your parents. It took her a while to open up about them. Single sentences, sometimes single words. Ivy wanted the world to see her a certain way, she was all laughs and smiles and energy, but behind that was more.
She was complex and maddening and some days full of fear that she’d hurt other people by not being who they needed her to be. I don’t think she ever realised that she was enough.
I loved her.
But I was never in love with her.
I suggested a date once; because we were spending so much time together I decided that it must mean something else. I’d just seen my cousins and they were all married and were having babies and I was thirty-one years old and had never had a serious relationship. I’d never spent this much time with anyone of the opposite sex who I wasn’t related to.
Your sister had laughed at me.
‘That’s not who we are,’ she’d told me. We were friends, platonic, no chemistry, no desire to get each other naked, no future for us with two point four kids and a house by the sea.
It’d kicked me at first, because – and this sounds arrogant – I didn’t get turned down, and this was kind of being turned down.
I’d moped, maybe. It threw me, because again, I’d been that boy, that teenager, that man, who women liked. I had women at book readings slipping their number into my pockets and others slipping into my DMs with propositions that made me consider having someone run my socials – which is what I now do, because I wasn’t a man-whore.
But I wasn’t used to there not being chemistry.
My brothers thought I was broken-hearted, but it was my ego that had taken the hit, not that I let your sister see that.
We carried on being the same as we were, nothing changing, playing pranks on each other, championing each other’s work, being a critical friend when either of us were stuck on a plot.
She was just part of my life so easily and I realised that I wasn’t in love with her. There was no way in this world Ivy and I would’ve ever worked in any way apart from what we already were.
Friends. The best of friends.
She told me about you. Her annoying little sister who followed her around when you were kids and spied on her when she was kissing her boyfriend. She told me about how you were her favourite Christmas present the year you were born and how she gave you a second birthday on June Twenty-Fifth to make-up for the fact that you only ever got presents once a year. She told me how proud she was of you for following your dreams with your photography, even though your parents didn’t approve and wanted you to have aproper career.
I asked Ivy about you coming to visit her on the island – it’s amazing here for photographs. We’ve even been able to see the Northern Lights on occasion. She wanted to bring you here, but there was something transient about your sister. I knew Puffin Island wasn’t permanent, that was never her intention. I didn’t know where would be permanent for her. She talked of staying in a shepherd’s hut in Northumberland, or spending time by a loch in Scotland next. Her plans were always for the next six months, never any further and I knew she drove her agent mad because she’d never commit to what book she’d be writing after the next one.
I guess she was a free spirit.
It was good to finally meet you, even though the circumstances weren't the ones I wish it had been under, and we didn’t get long.
You don’t look like Ivy. You don’t look like she described you – I think in her head you were permanently seventeen. Apart from your eyes – they’re the same.
I’m sorry about your dad. And I did understand when you said that the end would be a blessing, which would also deliver guilt. Dementia’s a terrible thing. Please let me know if there’s anything I can do.
Yours,
Gully
