Ghosted: A Novel

December—Three Months Later

Dear You,

Well, ho, ho, ho! Merry bloody Christmas.

I’ll be thankful for the end of this year.

This is my first letter to you in more than three months. I guess I’ve had a lot to think about. I’ve also been very busy trying to effect change with Mum without her realizing. That’s been Derek’s plan: liberate Eddie by stealth. He’s been magnificent, of course.

He set up a meeting with Frances, the vicar who’s been visiting Mum for years. She said there are a few people locally who are happy to visit isolated parishioners. Derek said that the idea was to establish a friendship between Mum and a volunteer—however long it took—so that eventually she’d trust them enough to want them to take her shopping, or to the odd medical appointment. Someone other than me she could call, someone to open her world up, just a chink.

So a chap called Felix is visiting Mum, alongside Frances, once a week. Felix is a Gulf War veteran. Lost his arm out there. Then his wife left, because she couldn’t cope, and then he lost his son in Iraq in 2006. So Felix knows about pain and loss. And yet, you know what, Hedgehog? He’s so jolly! I’ve only met him twice, but he seems like the most positive chap. Listening to him and Mum is quite something—her response to just about everything is negative, whereas his is unfailingly upbeat. Sometimes when he’s talking, I can see her thinking, Is he completely mad?

“Give her another few weeks,” Derek said to me the other day. “I don’t think she’s far off going out of the house with him.”

Derek even persuaded her to spend Christmas with her sister so I could have a break.

So . . . slowly but surely, I’m getting a bit more space. A bit more oxygen. I get glimpses of myself, from time to time—how I was before all of this. How I was during that week with Sarah. How I was when I was young. And they feel good.

Anyway! Here I am, on Christmas Day, in Alan’s new spare room in Bisley. It’s 5:45 A.M. and Lily’s already up, pounding on Alan and Gia’s door. I went mad and bought her a whole stocking’s worth of presents. Alan says I’m a selfish turd and that I’ve shown him up.

For now, though, I’m looking out of the still-to-be-curtained window at a gunmetal sky and I’m thinking about you. My dearest, most precious Alex.

I have no idea if you’re there. If you’ve stood at my shoulder all these years, reading the words I’ve written to you, or if you’ve been no more than a vibration of spent energy. Whatever you’ve been, though, I hope you have somehow known how dearly loved you were, how desperately missed.

Without you, or these letters, I don’t know if I’d have made it. In death you were as in life: kind, colorful, warm, a friend. I felt you, through these purple pages. Your vitality and silliness, your nosiness, your goodness, your innocence, your sweetness. You kept me putting one foot in front of the other. You helped me breathe when life was strangling me.

But the time has come for me to go it alone, as Jeanne says. To stand on my own two feet. And so, my little Hedgehog, this is to be our last letter.

I am going to be okay. Jeanne is certain of it, and—actually—I am, too. I have to be, really; I see every day in our mother what the alternative looks like.

I am even going to give in to Alan’s insistence that I start dating. I don’t really want to, but I accept that I have to at least give myself the chance of loving someone else.

Because that’s the thing: Mum can’t change, but I can. And I will. I will march on through winter, I will finish my commissions, and I’ll take on more. I’m going to start offering summer workshops for young people. I’m going to do this stupid Tinder thing. I’m going to get fit, too, and get better at stonemasonry, and be a stupendous godfather to Lily. And I’m going to do all of this with a smile on my face, because that’s the person people think I am, and that’s the person I want to be again.

That’s my promise, Hedgehog. To you, and to myself.

I will never forget you, Alex Hayley Wallace. Not for a day. I will love you until the end of my life. I will always miss you, and I will always be your big brother.

Thank you for being there. In life and in death.

Thank you, and good-bye, my darling Hedgehog.

Me xxxxxxxxxxx