Free The Secrets We Keep by Stephanie Butland Page B

I’m a little bit glad, really, although I’m probably being selfish. Mel’s the only person here who has a history with me that isn’t also with you, so she isn’t an automatic reminder. Not that I forget.
    I’m making no sense. It’s partly because I’m not sleeping, which makes the whole world slightly overexposed. But also because yesterday, you were supposed to get older, but you didn’t, and now that’s something else that’s wrong.
    I looked at your photo in the morning, and I wanted to wish you happy birthday, and then I didn’t, and then I couldn’t work out the tense—“It is, was, would be, could have been your birthday.” In the end, I said, “Happy birthday, my darling, precious Mike, who brought me to this cold, damp, twisty-turny little place and made it my home.” I said it because I’d found something to say that made perfect sense, whether you were alive or not. I said it to your picture, but if you’d been here, I would have said it to your sleepy, bristly, another-year-older face.
    I miss you. I love you. I’m here. I’d rather be there, where you are. Wherever there is. But you know that, because it was always that way.
    E xxx

Although Blake has been very clear with the Micklethwaites, telling them that they can call him any time, for any reason, and that he’ll help them in any way he can, Richenda has shied away from doing so. She blames her mother—she blames her mother for a lot, actually, one way or another—whose cry of “I’d rather die than take handouts from the state” had made for a long, cold, bleak childhood and a horror of taking any kind of help from any kind of institution.
    As she dials Blake’s number, she blames herself a little too, for her absurd idea that her family would be able to get through this time by relying on one another when, in reality, it’s been years since they’ve had so much as a fully civil and convivial mealtime.
    Blake arranges to come that afternoon, which gives Richenda enough time to calm down and feel a little foolish for making the call. She plans for coffee and questions about that poor policeman’s widow.
    But there’s something about his face, as honest as the sky, demanding honesty in return. So when he asks her how she is, how things are, she tells him. She tells him in a headlong jumble. The dog, who at least has Kate leaving the house but knocks the bin over several times a day and trails rubbish everywhere, and no one seems to find it galling except her. Rufus slotting back into life as it was before this as though nothing much has happened, while she feels as though everything is tilting. The pictures in the local paper of that poor policeman’s funeral, and his mother and his widow. Kate, hardly eating and vomiting and refusing to talk and how she’d looked up bulimia on the Internet and felt sick herself, all those girls destroying themselves as they tried to wrest control of something, and how she doesn’t know where shock and trauma stop being a reasonable, understandable reaction and start being something else. How glad she feels that Kate is here, how terrible that Michael Gray is not. (She makes herself say his name, Blake notes, in the same way that Elizabeth carefully forms the words Kate Micklethwaite , although Patricia can only bring herself to spit “that girl,” and rebukes her daughter-in-law for caring. Although only, Blake has noticed, when Mel is out of earshot.) The worry that having someone die in the process of saving you is a huge burden to bear, at any age, and because she is so young, relatively untouched by difficulty, Kate has no strategies for this.
    â€œShe has you,” Blake says, his first opportunity to say anything at all since sitting down. “Don’t underestimate that.”
    â€œYes,” Richenda replies, instantly underestimating it, “but she