Annabel Pitcher

Sometimes when I wake up, I forget that she's gone and then I remember and my heart drops like it does when you miss a step or trip over a kerb.

Let's pretend for just one moment that could actually happen. You close your eyes and I'll close mine and let's dream the same dream across the Atlantic, lighting up the darkness between us. Can you see it, Stu? Can you see us up there, shining in all the black?

When we were leaving London, Dad spent about an hour trying to push his wardrobe through the bedroom door. He turned it on its side. He tried it upside down. He tilted it one way and then the other but it just would not fit. Words like "Mum" and "Affair" and "Dad" and "Drinking" were just like that wardrobe--too big to get out. No matter what I did, I couldn't fit them through the space between my teeth.

I stared up at the sky and raised my middle finger, just in case God was watching. I don't like being spied on.

I swallowed all the doubt and all the disappointment and all the anger and they were almost too big, like vitamin pills that are difficult to get down even with water.