I know exactly what she did. I heard her running across the landing, away from our room, as I came up the stairs. It was obvious the minute I saw her there beside Gracie, flushed with guilt, pretending they were calmly playing together, when her chest was still heaving. She’s a terrible liar. An amateur.

I didn’t bother talking to Richard about it. He’d never believe me. He doesn’t have a prying, malicious cell in his body. But she and I are more alike than she cares to admit. Funny that, isn’t it?

That drawer sticks. It’s easy to open but there’s a knack to closing it and it wasn’t properly shut when I went to look. And inside, my mother’s old handkerchiefs and her jewellery lay jumbled in a heap. I would never leave them like that. And Catherine’s pictures shoved in their file in the wrong order. No one has the right to touch those. No one in the world, apart from me.

I know she hates me. I know she blames me for taking Richard from her. I understand that, however wrong she is. But she’s gone beyond that now. She’s become like him. Obsessive. Vengeful. He does that to people. Something terrible happens and they have to blame someone. To punish them. It’s how they make sense of things, even if the truth is, it’s no one’s fault. The car crash? She needs it to be my fault, another reason to hate me.

And what happened to little Catherine? He always needed to lay that on me, heaping it on top of all the other hurt until I nearly suffocated. Now he’s filled her mind with poison too.

Good luck to them both. All I ever wanted was for him to leave me alone, to take his grief out of my sight and leave me to deal with mine. I have dealt with it. I may not be whole but I’m still here. We’re all just trying to survive at the end of the day.

I knew it was him. I knew as soon as Richard told me that she’d met a man at the hospital who was suddenly part of her life. Oh yes. I didn’t need to hear the name.

I know what he does. I hear about it all the time from friends and from my mother who refuses to end her friendship with his. I know he asks about me obsessively. He asks about Richard. He stalks us both. He has so little in his life. He can’t let go of mine.

So of course he found out at once about the accident, about poor little Gracie, about Jen, the wronged wife, suddenly vulnerable and alone at the hospital. She fell right into his lap.

That’s why he was hanging around the ward, walking the corridors, looking for us all. That’s why he just happened to bump into her and befriend the suffering, needy mum. And she lapped it up, just as he hoped.

And then I saw him at DDs. It’s not the first time he’s gone there looking for me on a Saturday night. He knows it’s my favourite club. I took him there myself, once upon a time. And so he takes her there to find me, to show me what he’s doing. Pathetic, really.

I’ve thought a lot over the years about what happened with us. I’ve wondered, in the middle of the night, what on earth attracted me to him in the first place. I think back to my mother and the black hole inside her that I tried endlessly to fill. Maybe I saw something of her in him, thought he was someone I could finally fix, if I only loved him enough. Maybe I even liked his neediness at first, his fragility. Maybe he made me feel wanted. I don’t know.

I was a mess for a while. That wasn’t all his fault. Grief plays strange tricks on people. It warps their hearts. You know that children’s story about the magic mirror? The one that smashes into fragments which lodge in people’s eyes, in people’s hearts, so they see and feel only ugliness in the world, only evil in the people around them? That’s how it felt. For a long time. Until Richard came along.

I forgive him most things. The craziness. The stalking. The endless phone calls, even that string of abusive calls on the day of the accident, the ones that nearly cost little Gracie her life. I take responsibility for that. He can’t help who he is, not really, and I should never have let it go on like it did.

But there’s one thing I struggle to forgive. Why he took her to Venice. That wasn’t for her benefit, it was for mine. I felt it. A message to me. A new way to hurt me. A cruel way of trying to force me to remember. As if I could ever forget.

---

I was nearly eight months pregnant when we went. It was our last holiday before Catherine came and my very last chance to fly. We stayed in a small family hotel in the backstreets, all we could afford. Matt charmed La Patrona with his good looks and his smattering of Italian and she doted on me as only an Italian Mama can care for a woman about to give birth to her first child.

By dusk, once the tour groups headed back to their hotels, we had Venice to ourselves. One evening, we strolled through to Piazza San Marco in the fading light and treated ourselves to drinks in one of the over-priced cafés there, right on the Piazza. I sipped ice-cold freshly squeezed orange juice, one hand on my rounded stomach, and watched the lengthening shadows as Catherine stirred and kicked inside me. Matt was fussing beside me, warning me about the heat, the mosquitoes and who knew what other dangers he feared.

I didn’t even care. The last fingers of sunlight set fire to the gilded façade of the Basilica and it was so magical, so serene, and I loved that little girl, teeming with life inside me, with such passion that I was filled with hope. Maybe it was possible. Maybe, despite everything, despite my mother and Matt and all their unhappiness, maybe I could be happy, after all.

The following day, we took the vaporetto out to the islands. We had lunch in Burano, with its multi-coloured houses and cafés and shops piled with lace. I bought a tiny lace-trimmed bonnet for Catherine. I still have it. It’s the one she’s wearing in the photograph, as she lies, so small and so still, in her Moses basket.

And then to Torcello. I’d read about the cathedral and the amazing view from the tower. He said it was too much for me, I’d be tired. I wouldn’t listen. So I paid my extra lira and headed up there. It wasn’t such a steep climb after all. And the view was stunning. It was a clear day and I could see right across the Lagoon. The great dome of Santa Maria della Salute. The Campanile in St Mark’s.

There was a breeze up there and I stood against the wire mesh with my eyes closed, feeling its fingers cool and refreshing on my face after the stickiness of the walk below. It was timeless. Sometimes now, when I need to escape, I close my eyes and feel myself there again, the salty air on my cheeks, alone on the deserted tower, my beautiful baby girl safe and well inside me, high above the world.

It happened on the way down. I don’t know how. I was about two-thirds of the way to the ground. My legs were tired and perhaps Catherine’s weight unbalanced me too, pitched me forward. The sheer rounded bulk of my stomach made it impossible to see where I was placing my feet.

One moment I’m coming steadily down the steps. The next, I’m stumbling and falling forward into nothingness, my hands flung wide, scraping the smooth, curved walls as I pitch past, crashing and bouncing helplessly down towards the bottom. I don’t even have time to scream. I fall with such dreadful suspension – the moment stretching forever – and yet with such speed that I’m powerless to save myself. To save her.

He finds me close to the bottom of the steps, curled round in a heap. My hands and one leg are bloodied, my face bruised. When I finally hobble in to the hotel that evening, limping and half-carried by Matt, La Patrona makes the sign of the cross on her breast and kisses the crucifix round her neck.

She and Matt huddle in a corner and I know they’re discussing me. The fact he wants to rush me to a local hospital and I won’t go. It’s something else he holds against me, later. I’m not bleeding. I’m not in pain. Whatever’s happened, I don’t see how they can help. I want rest, that’s all. I want to believe there’s still hope.

So I lie awake all night, my hands spread across my stomach, trying to protect her, to heal her with my love. Please God, let her be alright. Please God. I’ll do anything. I don’t feel a single kick.

We took the first flight back to London the following morning and went by taxi from the airport straight to the hospital. Nothing they could do. Too late. No heartbeat.

They gave me injections and we had a desperate, endless wait until the contractions started and by afternoon, I was in labour. I suffered all that pain to deliver a baby girl who was perfect in every way apart from one small detail. She was born sleeping.

She was beautiful, you see. My Catherine Louise. Even now, there isn’t a day I don’t think about her. Perhaps not even an hour. And every night, every single night, I go to sleep praying to have that dream.

The dream where I’m holding Catherine in my arms and she’s so beautiful and she opens her tiny blue eyes and looks up at me and she’s alive, she’s breathing and it was all a mistake, a terrible mistake. I live for that dream. Even now.

Then I wake up and it’s one more day without her. One more day alone, without my angel, sleeping in my arms.