Don't Leave Me

5. What's Yours Is Mine

Sutures. They run through her heart and stitch her to Tine. Silk threads, spider fine. They are delicate individually but their combined strength holds her tighter than metal chains. They hold together with slipknots, so no matter which way she pulls they tighten around her.

She is caught.

And the kick is, it's a snare of her own making.

Each time Tine kissed her, touched her, hurt her, she did nothing. Each time, she accepted his gifts. But little did she know that it was just another stitch in the trap she'd sewn herself into.

She is beginning to wonder if she could ever pull free.

Or is it already too late?

Would she have to live this suffocating existence until it killed her?

But she had surprised herself, somehow dragging up the strength to ask Tine to leave. But how long would he stay away? And when he asked her to let him come back would she have the strength to refuse? She doubts she has much strength left for anything.

* * *

She drops her daughter at school like she does every morning, all the while avoiding eye contact and Malee's questioning gaze about her father.

As she pulls away from the school, she turns to watch her daughter's backpack slip across the playground until it disappears into the crowd of others just alike.

She feels a sudden agonising need to have Malee in the car with her again, to have her in her arms for just a minute, to tell her that she loved her, or at least to say goodbye.

But there is no time for that.

Minutes that had dangled in front of her in suspended animation only the day before now seemed to slip away so quickly. She needs to be quick; she needs all the time she has, needs to use them while they are still hers. She can't rip the stitches that holds her to Tine but she can pluck them out one by one. And for that she needs time and she needs to be alone.

So, she calls the hospital and cancels her surgeries, keeping the conversation as brief as possible. Then, she turns her car and drives to the house, hands clamps like vices to the wheel and eyes staring straight ahead.

First stitch; strands of silver and gold and diamonds and jewel slithers through her fingers one by one as she slips them beneath the surface of the lake. She holds back her mother's jewelleries and watches thirteen years of chains and earrings and rings Tine had hung her with ripple the cold, grey surface of the water and then disappear.

After sinking the jewellery she feels lighter, as if some of her pain had actually gone to the bottom with it. For the first time she can remember it almost doesn't hurt to breathe. She tucks her mother's jewelry in to her pocket and turns away from the lake, then, as an after-thought, tugs her wedding rings off her fingers and drops them into the water as well.

Second stitch; back inside the house, she moves slowly, first to the closet where she only takes the clothing she'd bought for herself, collected things that were hers and hers alone and left the rest behind. As she takes her clothes from the hangers, she lets anything that could be associated with Tine fall onto the floor and leaves it there. It is a dispassionate ritual, mechanical, like plucking stitches.

Her suitcase fills slowly. There is very little she feels she could take away without bringing memories with her; a luxury shaving kit of her fathers that Tine had never used, books she'd read in college and had never thrown away, photos of her parents and of a skinny little girl with wide eyes and a wide grin and less-than-perfect teeth, a younger, happier her she somehow barely recognised.