Shadows

She wills him her house and her money and he is hard-pressed to find a plausible explanation to give his wife – he's too tired and sad and lonely to think up a good excuse. He tells Deirdre that Fiona had been a great admirer of his work and had helped him on numerous occasions with editing. It is obviously a lie, and he doesn't tell it well, but Deirdre allows his pathetic explanation to stand.

They move into Fiona's house three weeks after her death and Deirdre immediately begins redecorating.

"She had simply ghastly taste," Deirdre declares as she covers the prettily-painted walls with dowdy, dreary, UGLY flocked Colefax & Fowler wallpaper. It's she who has the bad taste, thinks Ralph, and it's she who doesn't yet realise it.

But even with the new furniture and wallpaper and drapes she's still there, her presence haunting him.

She comes to him in the night, in his dreams, and he says to her, "you're dead. You can't be here." She comes anyway.

***

Over the years he and Deirdre fill up the house with their own children – the children that he and Fiona never had the chance to have – and he can't help but see shadows of her in every corner.

Ironically, five years after his first child is born, he finds her diary and he learns the reason why her pneumonia progressed so quickly and devastatingly. She was pregnant.

"I'm expecting a child," it reads, "in May. I haven't yet decided how to tell Ralph. I want a baby, I do – perhaps it will be less lonely when Ralph is with Deirdre. But I'm not sure what Ralph will think... I'll tell him the next time he comes."

He drops the diary and buries his head in his hands, sobbing bitterly. What cruel hand has Fate dealt him?

His oldest child, a boy named Fionn – his own small way of honouring Fee – toddles up to him.

"Daddy," the boy whines, "Molly's taken my crayons."

Ralph sighs unhappily but solves the dispute anyway. His wife watches him from the kitchen, noticing every weary line that creases his face.

"It's time for dinner, Ralph," she calls and he walks into the kitchen.

As they eat he hears a splash outside and stands up quickly, knocking his chair to the ground in an effort to see if Fiona made the sound – perhaps she is diving into the pool as she used to. It isn't her – it is a large branch falling from the oak tree that hangs over the pool. He sits on the stone steps and cries, Deirdre watching, always watching, from the house.

***

Thirty years later, when he is on his deathbed, all he can think of is Fiona. Fiona, Fiona, Fiona.

***

"You're dead," he says to her the next time he sees her in his dream.

"As are you," she replies, and takes his hand.

***

She promises to never let go.