It pained me to admit it, but perhaps through some subtle nuance in our messages, CerealKillerCornflakes had proved more perceptive than I gave him credit for, maybe correctly assuming that StabithaChristie was a woman.
I could feel the knots in my stomach writhing and tightening as I counted down the minutes until Chlo’s arrival. My mind had become such a tangled circus of chaos over the past few days that I could no longer separate my mild anxieties from the major, world-ending ones. When I saw her pull up to the house and get out of the car, I noticed right away that something about her looked different. Her skin had a remarkable warm glow, though it took me a moment to figure out why. There were a few spotty patches of bright red on her fair skin, but for the most part she looked like she’d been beautifully sun-kissed. Clocking me from the open front door of the house, she charged across the pavement and wrapped me in her bronzed arms, squeezing all the oxygen out of my body.
‘Oh, Ruthie, Ruthie, Ruthie, I’m so sorry! I’m so, so sorry,’ shesaid affectionately and effusively as she held me extraordinarily tight.
‘It’s fine, Chlo, honestly,’ I replied, trying to pry myself free from her iron grip. ‘I understand you were mad at me. I’d be mad at me too. I get it.’
‘What? Ruth, I’m not mad,’ Chlo said, confused, squinting her eyes and shaking her head bemusedly at me. ‘I just had no data and didn’t want to pay those frankly extortionate overseas roaming charges. Oscar surprised me out of nowhere and asked me to come with him to Florida on a business trip for four days. Did you know it’s thirty-four degrees there in January? In January, Ruthie.’
‘Wait, what?’ I said, trying to undigest what I had swallowed as a cold, hard truth over the past week. ‘So, you weren’t cross with me? Chlo, I thought you were friend-breaking up with me?’
‘No, Ruth. Why would I be cross at you?’
‘Well, I just thought I messed everything up with that Nico guy the other night…’
‘I mean, I was annoyed, Ruth, don’t get me wrong. But I understand. You’re an absolute weirdo and I kind of love that about you. There’s nothing you could do that would stop me from being your friend.’
God, I really loved Chlo. I take back every bad word I had ever said about her. Maybe, just maybe, I wasn’t as completely alone as I felt.
‘Okay, right. I want to get it out of the way first, then we don’t have to talk about it,’ Chlo said as we entered her bright pink Mini Cooper and began to chug down the road. ‘The TellTale Killer, it came up on my phone the moment I touched down. How are you feeling?’ Chlo asked, rather blunt for her but still with a level of delicacy.
‘Terrified,’ I replied simply and truthfully. ‘But not ready to talk about it just yet.’ I feared what I might let slip to her.
Accepting that for now, she shifted the subject to her new beau: Oscar. She told me how his job in finance had scored them a trip to Jacksonville in Florida and recounted every detail of theirtrip, from their impromptu visit to Disneyworld to Chlo popping her cherry on business-class flights.
‘I had three wines, Ruth, three. Like, who even am I?’ she said with a mock fluster. ‘And I could recline an extra ten degrees more than the peasants in premium economy.’
It seemed that thirty thousand feet up in the air, her class consciousness evaporated; I remember when Chlo had stuffed knickers into her coat pockets to dodge the baggage fee for our Ryanair flight.
‘I don’t even want to ask this, but… do you think the heart is still in the freezer?’ Chlo asked, a little way into our drive. The glance she shot me with the question was one that crackled with unease and apprehension.
‘Chlo, he hasn’t touched a single thing in Greta’s childhood bedroom for two years. What makes you think the heart would be anywhere other than the freezer?’
She flinched, clearly forcing the thought aside so she could keep her eyes on the road. As you’ll remember, we never retrieved Greta’s body, it was only her heart that the TellTale Killer left behind. Greta’s heart had been considered primary forensic evidence at the time, but the investigators had extracted every possible trace – DNA, fibres, residues – before finally releasing it to the family in an act of good faith. Most of the other families had chosen to leave what was left of their loved ones in police custody, clinging to the hope that one day technology might unmask the TellTale Killer. But Aleks had made such a relentless fuss that, in the end, they gave it back to him. I pictured it in its cold resting place, unsettlingly close to the jacket potatoes. I had given up finding the rest of Greta’s body a long time ago but I think Aleks lived in the liminal space between keeping Greta nearby and wanting to move on.
It wasn’t that Aleks wasn’t a nice man. He’d always been a quiet, but generally friendly enough chap ever since we had been kids. Chlo had kept in touch with him over the years, stopping by whenever she could to check in on him, but I felt like I never hadthe strength or maybe the courage to. Seeing Aleks seemed to physically hurt me in a way I’ve never quite been able to describe. I had heard of grief physically and emotionally breaking people, forcing them into a shape that was unrecognisable, but I’d never witnessed it firsthand until Aleks.
At first, when Greta died, the man simply shut down. He stopped working, stopped eating; the garden he had once doted on lovingly was abandoned to wither. Even the cherry blossom trees that had bloomed and dazzled every single spring since Greta and I were young had shrivelled and wilted. I can’t begin to fathom the agony of losing a child. Whenever I saw him, my own sorrow felt almost inconsequential beside his. Maybe that’s why I never wanted to see him, I didn’t want my grief to feel like it should be lesser than his.
We pulled up to his house, Chlo did an excellent job of parallel parking on the street which I complimented her on, and I begrudgingly got out of the car. As a somewhat united front, we tentatively approached the door.
‘You knock,’ Chlo muttered, nudging me with her elbow.
‘What? Why me?’ I cried.
‘Because I drove. So, you have to be the one to knock.’
Groaning, and feeling like we had regressed twenty years, I stepped forward and rapped three firm knocks on the door. A moment later Aleks’s frail, but stronger than I remembered, silhouette shuffled into view. I hadn’t seen him since the one-year anniversary memorial thirteen months ago, and he seemed marginally improved, slightly less gaunt, a hint more colour in his cheeks. Even so, he remained chalk-pale, especially compared to Chlo’s Floridian terracotta glow. Is it polite to say he looked far less ghostly?
‘Hello, Chloe. Hello, Ruth,’ he greeted us timidly as he fiddled with his glasses, performing what seemed to be the closest thing to a smile he could manage.
Chlo was instantly effusive, stepping forward and wrapping him in one of her suffocating signature hugs until Iworried he might simply crack and shatter in her arms. Although, it looked like he almost needed that hug. In fact, I think he probably liked it by the way that his hands hesitated at first, hovering in the air before they went to lay on her back. I would hazard a guess that he didn’t get hugged much anymore.
He ushered us into the living room, which had been slightly redecorated since we were last here, and offered us tea or coffee, both already prepared in a pot and cafetière respectively, along with an array of quintessentially British biscuits laid out on a plate. I politely nibbled on a custard cream while glancing angrily at some of the other biscuits that had the gall to be on the plate with such legends, particularly Garibaldis, or ‘squashed flies’ as Greta used to call them.
I looked across the newly repainted living room wall, and my eyes instantly clocked the photos of Greta and me as children, then later as teenagers with Chlo, when she had joined the school in Year 9, and added to our duo. I remember how Greta and I had practically yanked her away from the popular clique to join our small two-person motley crew. I don’t know why, but remembering Greta as a child always seemed to break me the most.
There were new photos on the wall now, ones I hadn’t seen before, which I guessed he had added sometime over the past year. I took a moment to stare at a new one of us at the beach, both caught mid-conversation as we daintily dipped our toes into the lapping ocean at Newquay. I wondered what benign nonsense had we been talking about; from my reckoning, we must have only been about twelve.
