One life, perfectly gift-wrapped with a shiny ribbon and her name on the tag.
Fiona had that to be grateful for.
But despite Adam's soft gaze and Ruth's cups of tea and the concerned looks she attracted, all she felt was a poisonous, overwhelming guilt. The gift of her life was ugly and unwelcome. The ribbon unravelled, the paper cheap, the sellotape peeling. She wanted more than anything to thrust it back at Danny and take the bullet herself.
Their last normal discussion had been about Winnie the Pooh. Winnie the Pooh, for goodness sake! She hadn't told him that he was so brave and so admirable and that if they were going to die it would be together – although, she was glad for that last one having remained unspoken. That lie. Neither of them was to know who (if either of them) would walk out of there and even when Danny decided for them all she might have been killed later too, doused in petrol and flames and grief.
She should have been the one to die. Not him. Not Danny.
Wes kept asking for that Winnie the Pooh story about Eeyore's birthday. Mummy smoothed his hair and said that it must have been misplaced, and offered a compromise of a Beatrix Potter story.
Mummy lied at work and she lied at home now, too.
"That book must have gone walkabouts – let's read something else."
"I'm fine, Adam."
When her son was in bed and her husband was asleep beside her, she'd take the book from her bedside cabinet and absorb the words pouncing from the well-worn pages. A children's storybook. A point of discussion between herself and a dead colleague.
"Look at all the cake and presents, Fiona."
She had so much to be thankful for, and yet the presents were empty and the cake was poison.
The bullet of a cold-blooded killer wasn't her cause of death but she had a different pain instead: a lethal dose of grief coupled with guilt, injected directly into the heart.