Poison

This man was my heaven. He’d always been my heaven. He’d been every scrap of sugar syrup my body ever craved, and my heart craved just as hard along with it.

But he was my fucking poison too. I could feel it running through me. Toxic.

Fuck what he’d given my body, he’d poisoned my very fucking soul.

“I told you I didn’t want to do this,” I said through the sobs. “I didn’t want to go there.”

“We have to, Anna,” he said. “We have to and I’m glad.”

“I’m not.”

“Please just hear me out before you say that,” he said.Chapter EighteenAnnaTen years ago.I was fidgety on the train, much more so than I should have been. I should’ve had the bliss of calm and retreat and everything I’d been striving for those past three weeks.

But I didn’t.

I’d tried Lucas three times already but he wasn’t answering. Shouldn’t have been that much of a big deal, but I hadn’t had a bank of messages through from him like I expected once I switched my phone on. Nothing bar a drunken bleat on night one with typos saying how much he missed me.

I looked out of the window and tried to summon the inner peace, but I wasn’t feeling it.

The messages had bleeped through when I got my phone back after the twenty-one day sanctuary up in Perthshire. Mum and Nicola and Dawn and Kelly from work. Hope it’s going well and missing youuuu and can’t wait until you’re home.

But nothing from him past that one drunken text.

I tried him again, but still I got voicemail. I would have called someone else, but it was just a niggle down deep and I didn’t want to worry them over something I was probably making out of nothing.

The train got closer to home and I tried to enjoy the journey. Towns and countryside and a whole world out there to view, but my mind just wasn’t on it.

I’d always been a self-help kind of girl. I’d always believed in the power of the mind and the soul and all those amazing ways to heal yourself from life’s challenges. They’d said it was stress at the doctor’s. The weird flashes of sickness and the waves across my head and the freaky feelings of déjà vu I was trying to make sense of.

Stress, they said. Too much on at work, which was likely. Not enough calmness of mind to rest easy, which was likely. So when the retreat came up advertised, with a thousand testimonials singing praises about how much three weeks of seclusion and meditation and therapy had cleansed their souls, I’d thought it was a good bet.

I’d cashed in three weeks of holiday from work, and Lucas had told me it seemed like a good fit, and I was off on my mission.

I thought it had been a good thing. I’d been through so much meditation that my mind had flown free. So much therapy that I’d have sworn there was a rose quartz permanently attached to my forehead. Hands-on healing, and hypnotherapy, and circles with drumming. All great stuff, with no weird stress flushes for a couple of weeks. Success.

And here I was on the train ride home.

Holy crap, how I’d missed Lucas. I’d missed my man so much.

I expected him to be at the station when the train finally chugged onto home turf, but he wasn’t there. I braved the rain and found a taxi at the rank and directed the driver to mine, but my heart was really racing by then. I was so worried, I felt sick, even though the rational part of me was still insisting it was nothing.

We were home in minutes. I paid the driver and grabbed my case from the back and then I was straight up our driveway, pulling my key from my handbag and letting myself inside with a smile.

But that smile was soon gone when I saw the state of the place.

Everything was different.

Pictures were gone, and the living room looked bare without his books and chair and coffee table. I was reeling as I stepped on through to the kitchen and found him there, standing at the island.

I dropped my case, only just realising it was still in my hand, and I should have been running up to him with kisses, arms open wide, but I was rooted to the spot, a horrible lump in my throat, even though I didn’t know what it was for.

“What’s going on?” I said, and my voice sounded distant.

His eyes didn’t look like his as they met mine. They were cold. Colder than I’d ever seen them.

“I’m leaving,” he said. “I wanted to wait until you got home to tell you, but I’m done. We’re over.”

I was shaking my head, not even beginning to fathom what he was saying.

It was insane.