There was no turning back from there. She had to die. I would shoot her to death and bury her in the cove.

I held the gun firmly, ready to fire. Then I feared the noise of the detonation would give me away. And I feared that her body would be recovered when some dog from the neighborhoods would come and dig where its nose told it something, someone was buried. And then the hole done by the bullet would steal be visible. They would know she had been killed, and I would be the easiest person to suspect for her murder. It was far too risky.

There would always be a risk that her body would be recovered. Any injure caused to her by a human hand could be identified. Soils were soaked in sea water and the only alternative to hide her was the sea itself. A human body, when kept still in a cold and wet environment, does not fully rot, it will always keep enouh evidence to tell the world its own story. Mortuary wax, they call it.

Her death had to be an accident. Or at least needed to look like it.

With the butt of my gun I knocked her on the head. Hard. She did not move for a second, that smile of hers still on her face. then she collapsed. Her eyes turned glassy, yet she was smiling still. For one second I thought she was dead, but the illusion was broken by the imperceptible motion of her chest. She merely had lost consciousness. Just as I had wanted her to.

I knew exactly what I had to do. I had to act fast. I carried her to the boat and laid her on the cabin floor. I did not turn the light on in the cabin.

I took her yacht to the sea, with the plan to sink her in deep water where it would be impossible to find her. But the elements were against me, the fierce wind blowing from the west, making the frail yacht drift to the left side of the cove where it would go crashing against the rocks within minutes.

I went to the cabin and opened the sea cocks. There was a spike leaning on the one of the walls. I took it and went out of the cabin. I locked the door from the outside. The portholes in the cabin were too narrow to provide an escape.

I was about to leave on the dinghy when my blood curdled. She had banged on the cabin door. She was conscious again and was banging repeatedly against the door. I hastily jumped into the dinghy, started rowing backwards and watched her sink.

Then they began. Her screams. I knew then that water must have started flooding the cabin heavily.

She would be drowned. She would because I had locked her in a coffin of a boat that was taking on water with no way to escape. I pictured her alone and helpless in the pitch black night of the cabin, with oxygen getting fewer and fewer, water reaching her knees, and then her waist, and breasts… She would desperately try to keep herself at the surface, knowing there was nothing she could do, that the end was ineluctable. Soon it would be her neck, and then her chin, her lips. Her nostrils. Her eyes, wide open in their eye-sockets.

The cabin sank underwater and took her screams with it, silencing them forever. Only the bow was emerging still. Moon appeared from amongst the clouds and casted an opal light on those two words painted in green on the bow : Je reviens. And I knew then she would come back, no matter how I tried to escape her, she would come back. As a ghost, perhaps. Or maybe as evidence against me in a court of law where an inquest over her murder case would take place. Or simply as guilt.

I killed Rebecca. I killed her spirit and I destroyed everything of her, to her very wish for a painless death. I am a murderer and a tormentor. That's what my second wife is so wrong about.

And when I join the dead, everlasting images of Monte Carlo's cliffs together with my guilt is what they bury me with.