Short Stories

3. Messages on the Mirror

He asked them to 'vocalise' their feelings, and wouldn't let Chris speak her own for her. She caught him watching Chris at one point in that first session, blue eyes narrowed, face alive with thought and — was that fear? Shock? But he never spoke of it.

John coaxed them and guided them and nurtured them over ten weeks — and she had never realised how empty, how soulless, Chris's eyes were until she saw the compassion, the life in John's. Chris barely spoke in any of the sessions, unless John directly questioned him. Then he answered in eloquent, charming sentences full of detached politeness. She felt Chris watching her as the sessions wore on. He didn't hit her, but he left another message in the mist after their second session.

If you leave, I will hurt you.

She didn't leave, because she remembered the way he used to kiss her and could not give up on it.

After their seventh session, when Chris had gone for a cup of coffee, she asked John if he thought Chris was ever capable of actual love for her. He said,

"There's a kind of love only experienced through suffering. A kind of love only learnt through pain. So yes, I think in his own way Chris does love you, even if to him you are a trophy. The question is... " And he put a hand on her shoulder, and he looked at her, and made her look at him. "Do you want him to?"

She heard that question for weeks like an echo of a song that could not be ignored. And she wondered... was it Chris's love she was looking for, or was it the woman's, that wonderful woman's, who she had lost?

But in their tenth, their final, session, shouting and ugliness and hatred were the only colours between her and Chris.

"I am not yours to torment," she snapped at him.

And something clicked into place behind his eyes, something cold, something horrifying, something deadly.

He walked out, and John looked at her.

"I'm going to do something with you that I never do," he said quietly, at such a contrast to the guttural noises that had come from Chris.

"What?" she whispered.

"I'm going to tell you straight up what you should do." He looked right at her, full of earnest concern. "You need to leave," he said. "Because this guy is going to kill you."

When she returned home that evening, she found another message on the mirror.

If you leave, I will kill you.

And she didn't leave, because she didn't want to die.

Act 3

She called John at ten O'clock that evening. Her voice was shaking but her eyes were dry, her face hard and cold.

"You were right," was all she said, as she crouched in her bedroom listening to the sounds of a knife being sharpened. "But I can't leave."

John, fear a drumbeat in his blood, knew what she meant. He told her to hold on, told her he was coming, told her it would be all right, but she hung up the phone before she could answer. He left his wife and kids and walked out into the night.

She stood up in that elegant, expensive bedroom, letting the hand holding her phone fall to her side, and faced Chris. He stood in the doorway, all roguish good-looks and comfortable clothes and the promise of violence simmering in his eyes.