Hi everyone.
even a novel of 80,000 words must begin somewhere, right? Let me know what you think, especially if you want to read on.
m
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Cara Hart had survived ordeals in her life, but nothing like this.
She slipped down the door of her childhood bedroom as though she had been run through and left there to die. And yet, for all of that, there wasn’t a tear in her eyes.
It had been six years since she had last stormed up to this room but she found now that nothing had changed. Her bed was still unmade beneath a dust sheet of duck egg blue. There was still a patch on her rug more faded than the rest of the carpet because the sun hit the spot at its most intense. The door of the wardrobe still hadn’t closed against clouds of a white silk dress. All of this was identical, frozen, even, in a moment of her history. It seemed all the more wrong that nothing would be the same again.
She could hear her father’s footsteps outside, climbing the stairs in a kind of reluctance as though he still hadn’t learned what it was to have a daughter who needed someone to hold. He stopped outside her door. He turned the handle so that it rattled at the side of her head. Andreas Hart sighed, as was his way. She could see the way he rolled his eyes before he spoke.
“Open the door, Cara.”
It was an order, and as though she was still fifteen years old and utterly under his control, Cara slid a few inches to her left. Every slight movement of her limbs like treason as the new seconds, new breaths only set her eyes to sear.
A walk in the forest where she used to play to mark her homecoming. Her eyes on the old tyre swing still clinging to a length of rope for dear life. Little threads of moss reclaiming the tree branch from which it hung. The thickness of the air, warm like a fireside. The softness of the earth. The stream where they used to race paper boats weaving back towards the village, looking less wide, less deep, less of an adventure.
Stumbling across her mother’s gravestone in a clearing.
Here lies Lucy Hart, it had read in barely weathered, immaculately kept letters, stiff and upright, as she too had been. Who was a wife and a mother and friend to all, and who will be forever missed.
Lies.
“Look at me.”
Cara obeyed, for as those moments had replayed, he had come to tower over her. She turned her eyes, now finally bloodshot, tear filled, to his face. Again, the new lines around his eyes and across his brow, the greying of his hair, were all signs that time had not, as she had thought, stood still here.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
Her father only laughed, the cold sound of a man who had come to terms long ago with a loss he barely mourned to begin with. For so heartless a man, even losing a wife to a year of illness was a shallow wound to endure.
“You were a thousand miles away, Cara,” he scorned, looking straight down at her as she cowered in the new corner between the open door and the wall. “For all I knew, you were dead already.”
“You knew where I was.”
“All the more reason to forget.”
Sending word would have been no challenge, not for a man like this who had money to spare and friends in high places all across the ruined land. Their experiences may have been polar, but he knew better than most the places she had fled to in the end. Cara had run away from home on the eve of her forced marriage six years ago but her final destination had been no great secret. After all, he had been part of the same army, the same still burning war fifteen years ago. She had kept her head down in the ranks of a force barely held together against a common hatred until, wanting to see her life come to more that that of an iron mercenary, she had returned home in the faith that there would be people here wiling to forgive.
“Listen to yourself.” Andreas continued with a fresh sneer. “Do you even remember how you left us? The middle of the night, the middle of winter, not even a note to rub it in your mother’s face. You should have heard me trying to explain to Arisaig that morning, in the back room of the church on your wedding day.”
“I don’t care! You knew all along that I hated him. I still don’t understand why my leaving was a shock to you.”
“It was for your own good!”
Another lie another nightmare. All that he had ever wanted from her, aside from meticulous cleaning of his house and backbreaking effort to maintain his gardens, was to see her dragged along on the arm of the only man in the region with more power than he. Cara, desecrated, merely continued to shake her head.
“When did she die?”
“Last autumn.”
The small cross which she had always worn in the hollow of her throat grew heavier. Though her hands shook, three fingers went to it, from habit. She could hardly remember where she had been. Some fruitless mission at the borders, no doubt, revelling in the slight freedom which came from being distant from the front lines. She had been enjoying herself, still believing that her cause was just. It was before her friends and colleagues had started to be cleaned away one by one like simple specks of dried on mud from kitchen tiles. It was before she herself had been so grievously injured as to see death’s door.
Cara stood, ready to escape. Her limbs were aching. Her eyes burned as though dried by a ruthless gale. She needed air, needed to force herself back out to the grave and find some way to take it in. She had spent years of her life hating her father, resenting her mother because she refused to do the same thing. In the last months of Cara’s life at home, she had torn them all apart. Perhaps then, her sorrow was that she wouldn’t be able to start what she had come here to finish.
He snatched the top of Cara’s arm to hold her back. His hand crushed the bullet wound, still painfully fresh beneath her sleeve.
“Where are you going?”
His eyes had narrowed. Her lungs had seized. Cara’s mind kept turning separate from his question. She realised then that he didn’t even know that she had been shot. The top of her arm still ached at a cold night, and he wouldn’t even care.
Without breaking eye contact, Andreas groped at the top of her bedside cabinet. He found what he was looking for without much effort, the wedding ring which would have kept Cara anchored to this place if she had been even a shade weaker. Though he pressed it into her fist, it wasn’t meant as a parting gift. Once again, he wanted to use her past weaknesses to keep her in his hand. This was a reminder after all, of everything she could have been, a contract finalised but not yet signed. It was proof that he still, after all these years saw her as a commodity and not a daughter.
“I’m your only child,” Cara whispered, her voice dripping something worse than bottled hatred. “You already ruined half my life. I’m not about to let you do the same to the rest.”
With the full force of fresh remorse and years of brooding, the force of a shadow of a southern soldier, she threw the ring at him. It rolled into a corner and lay harmless, catching the sunlight with a lustre like that of a bird’s feather. Not touched for six years, it still outshone her necklace.
Cara shook herself free and ran from the house for the last time. He swept after her. As she stumbled down the stairs, he stood above and watched. He heard her sob. As her hand was on the front door, he called down over her.
“You are no child of mine.”
She didn’t have the strength necessary to summon a final retort. She had never been able to answer back. With that, Cara ran.
With that, the prodigal daughter left.
Try - With that, Cara ran. The prodigal daughter had left.
