The White House - Book 6, The Porth Kerensa Series

Chapter Eleven

Elise started the day with good intentions to keep busy. She cleaned up the very little mess two adults created and made herself some coffee before heading out to the back garden to do some weeding. The wind was bracing, but the weak winter sun was shining and Elise felt free outside; less suffocated and watched like she did inside the white house.

She dug up weeds and turned the soil over; working her way steadily down the flowerbed. She was lost in thoughts of what to plant when she dug up the golden ring. Elise stood up and brushed the dirt off the thin gold band. It was nothing fancy, but Elise couldn’t help feeling a pang of sadness for whoever had lost the ring.

She wondered if they had misplaced it whilst gardening, or if it had been thrown away in a fit of temper, for no reason other than to hurt the person who’d pledged the ring. Her face flamed bright red at the memory of ripping her wedding and engagement rings from her finger and hurling them off the balcony of a villa in Greece. A holiday that was supposed to make her forget the grief she was drowning in…a holiday that would fix everything.

Instead it had been tense and it had culminated in an awful argument where she’d thrown her rings into the warm Aegean Sea and told him that everything was over. They’d spent the last two days of the holiday not speaking and the day after they returned to England Elise had tried to commit suicide.

Elise slipped the ring on the middle finger of her right hand and walked indoors to make herself a cup of coffee. She stood at the kitchen counter, waiting for the kettle to boil, and thought about the day she’d cut her wrists in the bath. She’d been forced to talk about it a lot with the psychiatrist during her stay in hospital, but she’d never told him the truth of how she’d really felt the afternoon she tried to die. She had known, instinctively, that honesty would not get her out of there.

So she told them what they wanted to hear. She told them the sadness and despair had crushed her; that the pain of her loss had become so unbearable she couldn’t bear the thought of living anymore. And eventually she told them she’d seen the error of her ways; that they were right when they said that Noah would not want her to be like this and that it was her duty to live her life. She’d nodded and agreed, even though she wanted to scream that it was all bullshit.

She never told anyone that she'd felt no pain once she’d made her decision, or that for the only time, since her first baby had died in her womb, she’d felt some semblance of peace. She hadn’t waited until the afternoon to cut her wrists because a part of her wanted to be saved and it hadn’t been a cry for help. She had simply run out of time after organising and sorting the things that she thought would be difficult for James to deal with after she was gone.

She had been relieved to say goodbye to a life she hated living. She had been looking forward to the end.

She had wanted to die…and for a long time afterwards she hated James for saving her.

      ******

She started out of her reverie, unsure of what had roused her, until she heard someone crying upstairs. It sounded as if it was coming from the second floor and for a brief second Elise wondered if it was simply more evidence of a mind that had cracked under the pressure a long time ago. In the old days she’d never been the type to believe in ghosts and hauntings and she thought perhaps this was yet another excuse to shield her from the truth. She was still clutching at straws and fanciful ideas that her experiences in the white house were something other than her broken mind playing tricks on her.

Would there ever be a day when she no longer questioned her sanity and could trust herself to know reality from fantasy? She hated feeling so weak and unsure of her own judgement. She had believed she could handle anything life threw at her…which had only made the implosion more devastating.