After Olivia left the next morning I went into the top shelf of my cupboard and brought out the envelope that was there. It was only two years old but it was gray with use. I had read it so many times I almost knew it by heart. Each word burned into my mind and still smoking after all this time. There were four pages to the letter. I opened them. The creases were so ingrained, they were soft and powdery, the ink gone from them.

I stared at the first page.

Her writing: neat, controlled, small and familiar. So familiar. Oh! Maria. I remember she used to write me love notes and put them into the lunchboxes she insisted on making for me. They wouldn’t say much…

I’m wearing no panties. When you come home, come find me, and without saying a word fuck me. xMina

Or it would say…

When you eat these corned beef sandwiches, just remember I thought of you while I was spreading the mustard and I will think of you all day until you return to me and spread my legs. xMina

But she had not left her last letter to be found by me. She had posted it. It arrived a day after the ‘incident’. At that time I was so shocked I read the whole thing twice and could not understand anything.

For days afterwards I had stared at it without any real comprehension. I mean, I understood the meaning of every word and I got each sentence when taken separately, but as a whole, in context: what the fuck was it all about? What the hell was she going on about?

Then I would think of her buying that grenade. I mean, who does that? Who blows themselves up with a grenade? People gas themselves in the privacy of their garage or take sleeping pills or slit their wrists, and the really scary ones launch themselves off buildings, but grenades? Wow! And afterwards, buying all those gas canisters just to make sure that nothing worth saving would come out of her bonfire.

If total annihilation with an audience was her intention she certainly succeeded. I saw it all happen in slow motion: the explosion, red first, then blossoming into orange, the middle turning white, then back to orange and red. Then smoke: thick, black, acrid smoke. I had lain on the ground and watched the car’s doors fly away, the glass shattering outwards and upwards, while all around me fiery debris rained from the sky. Roxy’s shoe was the hard part. The way it landed next to me, charred and heartbreakingly small.

Like a taunt. See, how powerful I am.

I used to stare into the bottom of a glass of whiskey and replay the memory of her, as she was the day before she died, chewing on an apple, laughing, an almost sublime expression on her face, as she watched me playing with the children. How could a woman wearing such an expression be thinking of ending it all the next day?

There had been nothing. Nothing to tell me she was unhappy, upset, or standing on the verge of committing suicide and taking our children with her. It was the most perplexing, shocking thing. Finally, I phoned her best friend.

‘Did you know that Maria thought we were having an affair?’

‘What?’ she had almost shouted down the phone.

‘She thought we were having an affair,’ I repeated.

‘Where did she get that idea from?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Then why would you think that?’

‘She left a letter.’

‘A letter? Accusing us of having an affair? I can’t believe it. I’d like to see that letter.’

‘No,’ I refused. I didn’t want her to know that Maria had referred to her as that two-faced, long-titted, no nipple, skinny-assed, cock-sucking, cum bucket.

She went silent.

‘Did she seem colder toward you or change in any way?’ I insisted.

‘No. We were best friends. We told each other everything,’ she denied, suspicion creeping into her voice. She was beginning to doubt the existence of the letter. She was like all human beings—she would rather believe a lie than accept that she had been so thoroughly fooled.

We ended the conversation on an uneasy note.

I called her other close friends. Did she say anything to you? The answer was always the same. No. No. No. No. I phoned her brother. He put the phone down on me in disgust.

Often I dreamed of my children. We were in a garden or a schoolroom. There were other children playing there with them. I called to them and they came running to me. I picked them up and held them tightly, relief pouring through my veins.

‘Thank God! Thank God. It was just a nightmare. I dreamed you were both dead.’

‘Like Grandma and Grandad?’ they asked me.

‘Like Grandma and Granddad,’ I told them, laughing and crying at the same.

‘But we are not real, Daddy,’ they told me solemnly. And then I woke up with tears pouring down my face. Wishing I had not woken up. Convinced they were still alive in another dimension.

Weeks later after the furore had died down, and after the hospital foundation had used words like ‘regretfully’, ‘untenable’ and ‘tarnished reputation’, the great thaw arrived. And with it came rage. How I cursed her. Bitch. Fucking stupid cunt.

It was so bad all my breaths became gasps of anger. I had to stop seeing friends. I was seriously at risk of totally, completely, unequivocally and corrosively losing my shit if another one said, ‘God wanted his little angels back so he called them home,’ or some other similar crap.

I wanted to spit at them. ‘Oh right! Is that why he chose to burn them to death? God didn’t do this, you fucking moron!’

During that period I opened the letter often and ended up slamming my fist on my desk so hard I eventually broke the damn thing. I was so furious once I decided to burn her letter in the fireplace, but my hand shook as I tried to throw it in: I couldn’t destroy something I hadn’t yet understood.

Months later I was carefully unfolding her letter and finally trying to understand my part in it. I no longer raged against her or her abusers who had turned her into a monster. The season of guilt had come. It was worse than the rage. Far worse. Oh the guilt. How it ate at my insides! It was all my fault for being so blind and so caught up with my own success that I never saw it. Not once.

Ever seen the way a team of termites can utterly decimate a tree until it is nothing but a shell?

That was what my guilt did to me. I walked around, an empty shell. I walked, I talked, I ate, I worked, but inside I was dead. There was no way to atone for what I had done. She was gone and she had taken my innocent children with her.

Olivia was gone, but her scent still lingered on my skin. I held the letter in my hand and it felt lighter somehow. Because for the first time I understood.

I held up a page:

When I am gone I will watch you and I will remember us. Our bodies spilled together. The light slanting into the room. The coffee cups with dregs. The croissant crumbs on the plate. One plate. We shared it remember?

Your breath on my skin. Your hand on my breast. Your leg thrown over mine. Your flesh. My flesh. Joined. Stuck. Forever. Forever.

Do you hear me, Dr. big shot Marlow Kane?

Forever. No matter who you touch. Who you fuck with that great, big, dirty cock of yours.

I know what big daddy long dick likes. I know all your secrets.

You think I don’t know how many cunts you have entered. Do they feel as silky as mine? Do they call your name when you are fucking them in the ass?

You like that, don’t you?

You start at the mouth, after a little while you move to the cunt, then when that insatiable cock of yours is nicely coated with pussy slime, you plunder the ass. And then you bring that shitty cock home and put it in my mouth.

You asshole, you! I’m still dripping with your fucking semen.

There was much more, four pages of the same insanely jealous, crude, totally baseless ranting—I was always faithful to her—but I won’t go on. You get the picture. I was a careless, blind fool who never understood that she had loved me with an intensity I did not feel or even guess at. I had loved her, but not the way she had loved me.

Wood only understands what it is to burn when it meets a flame. Olivia was my flame. She made me burn. She made me understand what poor, damaged Maria had felt: that all-consuming passion to possess someone so completely that renders death preferable to not having it. I never had the ability to miss anyone. Until now. Now I missed her the moment she left my presence.

With sadness I remembered the times Maria had said, ‘Come back to bed.’ And I had kissed her lightly on her forehead and hurried away to immerse myself in my work. She had rightly construed that as a lack of emotion. If Olivia asked me to come back to bed under no circumstances would I be heading off in the opposite direction.

For so long I had kept her poisonous letter. As if I deserved to suffer. Deserved to read her crazy lies. Now, I went to the fireplace, turned the gas on, and watched the flames rise up. I dropped the letter into them and watched the orange flames lick around the edges of the papers. Browning, curling, and finally consuming them until they were blackened ashes that fell into the grate. It was poetic.

The cremation of Maria’s letter.

As I watched the ashes began to fly into the room and for the first time there was no guilt or rage, only a lingering sense of profound loss for my children and for their loss: they would never experience kindergarten, get high behind a bicycle shed, fall in love, get married or know the great joy of having children of their own.

‘Time is the greatest healer. It will be less painful,’ everybody said, but time had made no difference. At night I still saw the flames reflected in their eyes as I ran in slow motion toward them.

I hurt as much today as I ever did and I guess I always will.