Page 22 of Forever is Now

Adelaide James: But I think everyone will agree that you know how to spin a story. Your success as an author is proof of that. How do we know that you’re not the ultimate unreliable narrator, even now?

Summer Taylor-Braddon: Look, Adelaide, your views and mine are never going to go off hand-in-hand with each other, into the sunset, are they? I’m telling my story, and you’re apparently telling yours.

Adelaide James: And now you’re being condescending. That makes you seem defensive. Like you’ve got something to hide.

Summer Taylor-Braddon: You want to know how I feel? How I really feel? I still feel trapped, because of what you and other journalists have done to me. It’s like the whole world is a prison now. I only really feel safe at home—but nowhere actually feels like home now. We’ve had to move so much, every time our location is published, we’ve moved.

My whole life has changed, and it feels like so few people understand.

I just want to escape.

Adelaide James: I guess that explains why you’re writing all the time now. Why you’re desperate to distract yourself. It’s a great form of escape, is it not?

Summer Taylor-Braddon: The only form I’ve got.

Adelaide James: And were you writing, during this time that you were talking about earlier? When you returned to England, after Ruari apparently disappeared?

Summer Taylor-Braddon: No, I wasn’t. It felt too indulgent to do it, even though I knew I needed to. I mean, I had books under contract. They’d sold on proposal, but I hadn’t yet written them. Only had maybe three chapters of two of them done. The third was just a vague one-paragraph pitch. So I felt pressure to write. But also, I needed to for my mental health—but my mental health was always going to be shot to pieces when he wasn’t there.

Adelaide James: You like playing that card don’t you?

Summer Taylor-Braddon: What card?

Adelaide James: The mental health card.

Summer Taylor-Braddon: Look, the whole time I’d been having these nightmares—so many different ones too. It wasn’t like it was the same one, because even that would’ve been better, been reassuring. A part of my subconscious would’ve known what was coming and I’d have been able to prepare.

But these nightmares were all so, so different. The unpredictability was the worst.

Mum wanted me to see a therapist. Deep down, even I wanted me to see a therapist. But I couldn’t face it.

Adelaide James: Of course you couldn’t, because they’d know that you were lying about it. Not really having any of these “nightmares”. That it was all a lie, to get sympathy.

Summer Taylor-Braddon: I couldn’t leave the house. I was terrified. We’d had people trying to break in at the last place—this whole group of men showing up and trying to break down the front door. They broke one of the windows too. There was broken glass everywhere, and I called the police as I locked myself in the bathroom upstairs. I was so scared, just waiting for these people to hurt me.

The police did get there in time. Arrested the men. But it didn’t really stop that sort of thing from happening.

It didn’t make me feel any safer.

So instead, I wrote.

Adelaide James: Oh, what a difficult time that must have been—penning your next multi-million-pound book.

Summer Taylor-Braddon: It was therapy writing, actually.

Adelaide James: Of course it was. Anything can be a therapy-thing now, right? Therapy-writing, therapy-guinea-pig, therapy-sofa. It’s getting quite out of hand.

Summer Taylor-Braddon: Therapy writing is valid. It helps you take back control of your mental health. And the more I wrote about myself and the feelings and how I thought about the sea now, the more I realized this wasn’t what I needed to be writing.

Writing fiction helps me process and understand myself. Writing fiction opens up a part of my soul that lets light in, that heals. And so I began writing stories again. I opened my notebook and I chose a nice pen. I scribbled words—frantically, furiously at first, until I bled over the page, raw, acrid.

Adelaide James: You like being dramatic, don’t you?

Summer Taylor-Braddon: These are my words. This is my story. But after I had written for a while—yes, thesesilly little therapy writings—that night, for the first night in a long time, I didn’t have a nightmare.

I dreamed instead of Ruari in a calm way. A loving way.

And when I woke up, I knew it was a sign—a sign from Heaven, I believed. He was telling me he was okay. And so long as I wrote every day, continued writing my stories and trying to look after my mental health, I’d be able to live with him in my dreams.

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