Baker Street is quiet without him. I'm back here because I can't bear to face that woman, and he's still in hospital because of her, sniping at all and sundry. He says I should accept it and move on with her, as if he's forgotten that he damn near died because of her. Surgery, he says. Refusing to acknowledge attempted murder. Yet, it is all that I can think of. Because dress it up how you will, it was attempted murder. And it was my wife.
Every time I think about her, the questions come back in a flood. If she'd come clean when Sherlock came back, we could have tried to sort it out. It would be a lot easier to face then, before I made her my wife, before there was the baby on the way, before she shot Sherlock. She didn't have to shoot him, but she still did. And if I asked her, I know I'd get more of the same.
What is real anymore? And what is only more of her lies? Those lies that have permeated every facet of my life. Those lies that stopped Sherlock's heart. Once, almost twice.
Maybe she's even lied about the baby.
Oh, she's pregnant alright. I know that. Unless even those symptoms that Sherlock noticed were more falsifies of hers, carefully planned as a contingency for whatever reason she may have invented to justify it to herself and to me, should I discover her deception. Perhaps the positive test result was fake too.
For all I know, it's all faked.
The memory stick won't answer these questions, won't tell me the things that I need to know the most about this woman who is my wife, though I hardly even think of her as that anymore. Don't know what to think about her, aside from this anger and sadness. Her very name is a lie, stolen off a baby's grave.
Three weeks. It's been three weeks since he was re-hospitalised. Three weeks since he almost bled out here on the floor, and I didn't even notice before it was almost too late, because I was so damn caught up in that woman, in my own domestic drama. So distracted that I didn't even see my best friend dying in front of me, though he sure tried well to downplay how ill he was. Even now, the memory makes me feel ill, makes burning bile rise in the back of my throat. Not just because of her deception, but also my own guilt. I may as well have been complicit in the whole thing. If left to the two of us, he would have died. It came far too close as it was.
I never would have forgiven myself. Likely won't anyway, though he'll survive.
The place is really far too quiet without him banging round or complaining of boredom. Even when he's stretched on the couch in his mind palace – though sometimes, I swear he's been sound asleep – the whole flat feels as if he's present. Now it's empty, all of it. My old room doesn't feel right anymore.
It hasn't been my room in a long time.
If I had stayed at Baker Street before, had never met her, would any of this have happened? I find it hard to believe that it would have. Although, perhaps, Sherlock would be dead then, without me to stay her hand. (So he says. She only backed up what he said. Maybe it sounded plausible enough to her ears that she didn't feel the need to correct him.)
It seems as if I don't know anything anymore. I don't even know the woman I'm married to, only the face and image that she presents to the world. As much of a façade as those houses in Leinster Gardens. (Trust Sherlock to have his bolthole there.)
The baby mightn't even be mine. How could I stay married to her then? How deep does the deception go? Is it ingrained in her very DNA?
Nothing would surprise me now, where she is concerned. She could still be secretly working for her old employers, though I'm sure anything like that would be wiped off the memory stick. Only so much she can reveal to me at a time, after all. And most of it falsity, lies and more lies all heaped together.
Again, my thoughts are drawn back to what Sherlock said the night before he jumped off Barts' roof. Selling a big lie by wrapping it up in truth. It's what they did to him. Maybe it's what she's done to me. Maybe the emotions, the feelings are true after all.
Maybe the baby is true, too.
I don't know what to think.
But if the baby isn't mine . . .
Surely it is, though. Surely.
Surely, but not certainly. Nothing's certain where she's concerned.
You can't kill an idea, he said that night, so long ago when it felt that the walls were closing in on us, the world tumbling down. The idea has been planted in my head, and he hasn't said anything about it. I don't want to tell him, in case he confirms it. But if he knew before, he would have mentioned it.
It just mightn't have occurred to him.
So many variables, so many unknowns. And still I am haunted by the memory of him pale and unresponsive on the floor, hardly breathing, bleeding to death. If I had been slower . . .
It doesn't bear thinking about. So much doesn't bear thinking about. Most of it lies, of one form or another.
What's left?
Far too little.
This is the battlefield, now.