Casey Kelleher
MINE
In loving memory of my beautiful Aunt Sandie x
Prologue
You never anticipate how your world can completely change in just a short space of seconds.
How one tiny movement, one slight jerk of the steering wheel, one split decision can change everything.
And it does change everything, forever more.
That was the thought that flashed through my mind, as we glided through mid-air, in slow motion, our heads whipping back and forth with every jolt.
BANG.
Your body catapults from the chair beside me. I see your skull crashing against the windscreen, decorating the glass with a newly formed web of jagged cracks. A web that is speckled with fragments of your bloody scalp and clumps of your hair.
My body slams backwards, hard against the leather. The seat belt, saving my life, holding me in, as shards of shattered glass rain in around us both.
A deafening sound of metal crunching against wood and earth roars inside my ears as the car starts spinning weightlessly through the air, then crashes suddenly into the ground. We flip over and over, our limp, broken bodies cocooned in the crushed metal as the wreckage folds in around us.
I black out.
Maybe for just a few seconds, or minutes. I don’t know. But when I come back around my head is throbbing and I’m dazed, my head feels fuzzy.
I panic, opening my eyes wider, only I can’t see properly. Instead I’m blinded by a bright, brilliant white until I realise with relief that my head is buried in the airbag.
My nose has exploded with the force of the impact and I can taste the acrid metallic trickle of blood as it slides down the back of my throat.
I turn my head, my vision blurred and hazy as a stream of blood runs down my face and into my eyes. I reach up and touch the deep gouge in the flesh of my forehead lightly with my fingertips.
Disorientated, I realise that I’m hanging upside down in my seat.
The car is on its roof, the metal shell folded in around me. The seat belt is the only thing keeping me from falling.
I feel claustrophobic, I can’t breathe. I need to get out.
I’m panicking, pulling frantically at the seat belt and pushing the release button, but it doesn’t budge. My body weight is pushing too much tension onto it.
I don’t want to look, but I do.
I turn my head, staring ahead at the windscreen, the glass missing now, I see you.
Your twisted, broken body, hanging half in, half out of the window. And I know that you are dead, as you hang there, limp and lifeless, dangling from the car.
For a few moments it’s like time has stood still, the world so deafeningly silent that for a second I wonder if perhaps I’m dead too?
That my heart has given up?
That I’m not really here?
Instinctively, I place my hand on my chest, embracing the dull thumping beat that pulsates beneath my fingertips, still so persistent, so obstinate.
I wince. Wishing to God that my heart had stopped.
Because I know that there’s worse still to come.
Chapter One
‘I now pronounce you husband and wife.’ The registrar’s voice jolted Rebecca back from her daydream.
She shakes her head, still in disbelief. As if in denial. But the tiny movement is futile. This is real, she realises as the registrar’s announcement echoes within the walls of the huge, sparse ceremony room.
‘Mrs Rebecca Dawson,’ Jamie Dawson says, leaning in close and kissing his new wife tentatively on the mouth, to make it official, before whispering in her ear, ‘That has a lovely ring to it.’
Rebecca laughs then, finds herself repeating the words out loud.
‘Rebecca Dawson. I like it, it suits me.’
He’s right, she thinks. It sounds perfect, each letter rolling slickly from her tongue as she allows Jamie to wrap himself around her. The broadness of his arms and shoulders cocooning her into the warmth of his embrace. As if he’s shielding everyone else in the room, so they can have this one last intimate moment all to themselves.
They kiss.
For a few seconds it feels as if there’s no one else in the room. Only the two of them in a world of their own.
Though it wasn’t hard to pretend they were alone, when they were accompanied today only by their two witnesses.
But Jamie had insisted on a small, intimate ceremony, and Rebecca knew why.
He’d done all of this for her.
He’d sacrificed his chance of a lavish white wedding just so it wouldn’t magnify any wounds for Rebecca. So she wouldn’t have to walk into a room full of strangers and see her side of the church sitting empty.
Another reminder of the loss she’d endured in her life. A past filled with so much pain.
He’d listened when she’d told him about losing her parents at such a young age, how she’d suffered a lonely upbringing in care with no other real family in her life to speak of.
She knew this was his gift to her. This wedding, with just the two of them and their witnesses.
He hadn’t even invited his own mother. He did that for her, broken his mother’s heart no doubt, to help protect hers.
Even so, when she’d first walked in and seen Jamie standing at the end of the short make-do aisle, she’d faltered for a few seconds.
Her feet stuck to the floor, unmoving as her eyes swept across the brightly lit ceremony room. The huge earthy fireplace that lined one wall, and the rows of bookshelves at either side of her.
The room seated twenty people at most, but only two chairs were taken up by their witnesses, Lisa and Michael. The sight of so many empty, undressed seats made her flinch.
She second guessed herself, just for a split second, wondering if they were doing the right thing.
Because as much as Rebecca had hoped for this, as much as she’d prayed for this, the haste of Jamie’s proposal had actually caught her off guard.
She’d never expected it all to happen so quickly.
A whirlwind of a romance some would say, marrying merely three months after they’d met. Others, more cynical, might say a whole lot more. They might think Rebecca was a gold-digger. Or that Jamie was blinded by lust. Or that perhaps she was pregnant, and this was a shotgun wedding.
But it didn’t matter what others thought, Jamie had said the day he’d surprised her with an engagement ring, down on one knee.
Because this was different. They were different.
She hadn’t thought twice about saying yes, throwing her arms around him. Kissing him hard and crying tears of happiness before joking that they might as well do it quickly, before he changed his mind.
Just weeks later, here they were, standing in the Mayfair Marylebone room at the library, as husband and wife.
‘I’m your family now,’ Jamie said softly, taking Rebecca’s hand and holding it to his lips which made Rebecca want to weep, because she knew he meant it. That Jamie would be true to his promise.
That he would look after her.
That this time it would be different.
It was all so perfect that even now there were moments she just wanted to pinch herself. To check this wasn’t all just some cruel dream that she’d awake from at any moment, finding herself back there. Back in the darkest depths of despair from which she’d fled.