From Chapter 43
Clare Valentine removed her wedding ring for the first time in nearly 20 years and stared at the white band of skin beneath. It seemed a strange sight; the pale, sagging skin that usually sat beneath the band of gold looked surreal exposed to the wider world.
She grasped the ring between finger and thumb and held it up to the light, and myriad tiny scratches glinted before her eyes. Each scratch was a memory, an experience, and whether they were worth recalling or burying deep in her unconscious didn’t matter: they were still there, they existed – perhaps more than she did now.
Clare returned the wedding ring to the dresser beneath the window and stared at it from the stool where she sat. It looked so insignificant, tiny. Just a piece of metal, really. But what significance they attached to it.
She could remember the day she and Bob picked the wedding bands from the jeweller on New Market Street. She had thought about white gold, but on her finger it didn’t look substantial enough. Her mother had a wide gold band that signalled solidity. She wanted that too.
‘Isn’t it a bit big?’ Bob had said. ‘Like something to go through a bull’s nose…’
She smiled at the memory. There were many more like it, still stored away, secreted in the strangest of places, surfacing when you least expected them.
How could she bury those memories? Did she want to?
Clare turned away from the window and half-rose from her seated position, then decided to sit down again; as she slumped back to the stool she sighed heavily. She felt weary, tired, more so than she had ever felt; it was like all vitality had been drained from her, sucked away to who knows where.
She dropped her face into the palm of her hands and started to cry. The sobbing lasted only a few moments before she shook herself back to the reality of her bedroom and escaped the youthful flashbacks to better times. She didn’t know how she had come to feel this way, how everything had changed, but changed it had.
Clare pushed herself from the stool and made her way to the wardrobe. There was not much left to pack: two cases full already was more than enough. There was just her coat, and she could wear that; nothing else would fit in her luggage.
As she stared at the two full, bulging suitcases on the bed, they seemed to press on her mind, light the landing torches that were summoning in a descending guilt. She turned away sharply and touched the side of her face.
‘Get a grip…’
The girls were older now. They were hardly children – more like young adults. They would understand. She knew they would. They might shed a tear for her the first night she was away, but that would be all.
She’d seen their friends talking about their parents’ separations like it was a trip to the supermarket; it was all just another rite of passage these days. But the guilt was still there, no matter what she told herself. There would be no more family Christmases, no more family birthday celebrations . . . no more family. Because, and she made no mistake, that’s what Clare knew she was doing: destroying her family.
She flicked her fingers away from her face and tried to ball a fist. It was a pathetic-looking symbol of anger, but she felt the need to press it into her thigh and attempt to spark some dudgeon.
‘You did this, Bob…’ She shook her head. ‘Not me.’