Page 18 of Forever is Now

It all caught fire, you know? This small thing that you had said—had written—it blew up from there. The papers said I was guilty, had fled the country, but that French officials didn’t want me there. That was apparently why I returned to the UK. Not because I live there. Not because our location had been compromised.

And it was all because of you, Adelaide James. You turned it into a witch hunt. A proper witch hunt. You’ll have seen the reports about the injuries I got, right?

All I’d tried to do was go down to the Co-op. We’d run out of milk. And bread. Pretty much everything. Mum had put an online order with Morrisons in, but the driver hadn’t been able to get to our house with all the paparazzi and reporters outside. I don’t know if he’d tried to deliver it to us and found he couldn’t, or if he’d just turned straight around and left.

But he wasn’t coming.

Mum was sobbing by then. She looked pretty sick, getting iller each day. Her kidneys—though we didn’t know she’d got kidney disease then—but also the stress.

“Don’t worry,” I told her. “I’ll get the shopping tonight.”

“You can’t go out there!”

But I could. And I would. I told her I’d wait until it was dark, then sneak out the back. I had one of Ruari’s big hoodies and I’d wear that. I did wear that. Put my hair under a baseball cap—I think that was Ashley’s. He’d left it behind, years ago. Not sure why I still had it, but I tucked my hair into it. Wore dark glasses, even though it was nighttime when I went out.

And it worked. I remember just walking down Station Road, and no one really paid attention to me. Of course, not many people were about. It was what, nine? Maybe half past. It felt like freedom.

I can’t describe to you how amazing it was, how amazing it felt, just being able to do the shopping, like a normal person.

I didn’t even see the person. Or the bottle of wine in their hand. Not until it was too late.

Six hours later, medics were still picking glass out of my scalp.

Adelaide James: You’re good at painting yourself as the victim, aren’t you?

Summer Taylor-Braddon: You know what? I’m just going to ignore you until it’s actually your turn to speak. Because you may think you’re the interviewer, but this ismyproject.

It didn’t take long before the papers found out about Ruari’s mother. What had happened. And they connected it to me. That said that I’d ‘struck before’. They called me a clever killer—but not clever enough. Clever but not clever enough, and so many people believed that.

I remember reading loads of stuff posted on social media, all about me. My readers were claiming to know me. My dark fiction was a mirror to the dark interior that lurked inside my twisted mind.It’s obvious she’s not right in the head, one person wrote.

I wasn’t right in the head. How could I be?

I still remember the swirling comforting hand of the sea. The relief it had promised me in a reunion with Ruari. I dreamt of it each night.

More than once, I wanted to die.

But I didn’t do anything like that again. Even when I wanted to. Because for one, Mum made sure I was never on my own. She even slept in my room with me, most nights, and she always had plans for us to do in the day, things that took up literally all the time.

Not menial stuff, mind. Important stuff. We were fundraising for extra searchers to go to Indonesia to look for Ruari. We were trying to combat the media’s lies, trying to talk to lawyers and solicitors and all sorts of consulates and important people.

But I couldn’t go out on my own. Not to the Co-op, not anywhere.

And after a while, mum stopped trying to get me out of the house.

I just wanted to stay inside all the time. I’d watch mind-numbing TV in the gaps when there were no online meetings for me to attend. I’d do jigsaws. I’d talk to Julia and Hana, but gradually they stopped calling. Well, I mean, it’s not fair to put it all on them. I never really made an effort either. And they’d done more than enough, trying to help me.

It took months for me to recover from that assault at the Co-op, physically. But it was longer than that, inside. And I’ve still got the scars. Ones you can see and ones you can’t.

We blamed the press for it. Mum in particular blamed you, Adelaide.

“She does this with everyone she writes about,” Mum told me. She’d been researching you. Looking at other people you had gone after. Some ballerina at a London school who you accused of killing her twin. Something like that. All lies.

But now you were doing it to me. And I thought that maybe when I was in hospital, recovering, that you’d have stopped. I thought you couldn’t possibly do any worse.

I was wrong.

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