My mother used to say that you should regret nothing in life. That, if anything, you should regret what you didn't do, not what you did do.
I do both.
Like most regrets, mine has haunted me for the rest of my life. Unlike most regrets, mine can talk.
For most people, their regrets are nothing more sinister than, 'I wish I'd travelled more.' 'I wish I'd taken that job.' 'I wish I'd eaten healthier.'
You know what mine is?
I wish I'd helped. I wish I'd kept my mouth shut. I wish I'd followed her sooner.
Because, if I had, things might have ended differently.
Because she might not have died.
She didn't have a happy life. Part of that is down to me. So, in death, she made sure that I didn't, either.
I was thirteen years old when it happened. I remember that day so clearly. I have to. I have no choice. I cannot forget. She doesn't allow it.
Do you remember when you were little, darling? When the room would grow cold and I would shudder and cry? When you saw a figure at the foot of your bed, dancing in the shadows?
That was her.
When you were first born, I held you in my arms and I wept. I wept with happiness that you were safe and healthy. I cried that she would never have a child of her own, and all because of me. I sobbed that because of me, there was a mother somewhere whose child had been taken from her, cruelly young.
And my heart broke as I prayed that my child would never see what I have, that she would keep her innocent eyes free and untainted by such horror.
Corpses aren't like they are in Hollywood films. You don't need to see a maggot-ridden carcass. Blood, and gore-sprayed walls.
The worst horror of all is seeing someone sprawled on the floor, limbs pulled, foetal, to her chest, glasses askew. Smelling the sick-sweet aroma of death's claim, cloying, clawing at your nostrils. Feeling the bile rise in your throat and drown your scream before it touches your lips as your belly rises in protest.
And knowing unshakeably that you caused it all. That is horror. And she has never let me forget it.
At night, those endless, dark stretches, I'd hear the silent echoes of my guilt. I'd hear the whisper as it seeped into my bones, cold as death.
Murderer.
But my disbelieving eyes would open to reveal her, floating above my bed, baleful eyes pale and hard with accusation.
'You did this, Olive. Are you happy now?' She would hiss, her breath a foetid whisper, the dying shriek of a night-ghast, and at first I would cover my ears against her words.
I soon stopped that. She would not let me escape so easily. She would simply glide through me, achingly slow, and the cold would chill my blood, biting at my heart. Her memories would become mine, polluting my thoughts until I could not stand it, my entire body fighting at the loneliness that infiltrated it and the air would sag with the weight of her seclusion. So I allowed her to speak.
'Are you happy, Olive? You got what you wanted, didn't you?…..Do you want to know how it feels, Olive? To have life wiped from your body and no one care….to lie there for hours and no one come to look for you…..'
She even appeared at your Uncle Albert's wedding.
That's why I spent half the ceremony in the toilets. I told everyone I had a stomach bug. Your aunt Elsa made me swallow steaming mugfuls of her homemade Aches - B - Gone potion and I swallowed it placidly. Because what choice did I have?
How could I tell them that I'd been retching because I was choking on the guilt, the shame? That I was gasping for air as the tears claimed me? How could I say that my past had come back to haunt me - literally?
Because no one knew why she was following me around, not really. No one knew I was the last person to see her. Alive and dead. No one knew. Not then and not now.
Even when I went to the Ministry of Magic to ask for help. I couldn't cope with it anymore. It was your father who made me go, in the end. The strain of it was making me ill. I lost so much weight, with vomiting and being too cut up to eat. I spent a week in St Mungo's over it.
The Ministry fixed it so that she couldn't come near me. I had to get an SRO - a Spectral Restraining Order - in the end. She's at Hogwarts now. But the guilt has never left me.
This is why I am telling you this now, my darling. They say that one should go unburdened. I haven't long now. I have kept my secret for forty long years. I cannot take it to my grave too.
They say that if you repent, if you sincerely, truly repent on your death bed, then you will be forgiven. You will be granted passage to Heaven. I pray that this is true.
But even if I'm not forgiven, if my crime is too heinous, it won't change a thing. I've been tormented, tortured by myself and the innocent I killed, for four long decades.
So what's an eternity?