This woman. It is a puzzle still. How can I have been so thoroughly deceived? Not simply in my conviction of having seen her true self, the first time I saw her - how wrong I was, and how shallow and thin was my first impression, based only on her beauty and my despite of the role she had adopted when our paths met - but in my feelings for her. There, I was most completely fooled.
I had thought myself incapable of love. Had imagined that I put away all such sentiment when I admitted that the best, the youthful, the healthiest part of my life is gone. I planned an existence without affection. My mind was to be pure and clean although my body was not. No pollution of amour would find its way past logic and fact.
The sight of her was a shock. I expected someone mean and two-dimensional. But even as I stood surprised, my first instinct to mock, I could see that she had intelligence, a spark in her eyes, and I wondered how she could have stooped to this forgery of a life.
Perhaps it was her beauty which led me to continue our association, and even, to become close. I am male, after all. It is hard to resist the charms of the female form and indeed, in most cases there is no reason to.
But then, as we grew together, I learned her secrets - all of them, I believed. I understood her, and was prepared to accept, if not to acknowledge, that she understood me. We were a partnership long before such a thing was formally suggested. I saw it coming, and my own proposal was ready.
Then I saw a moment, my opportunity for vengeance against all the wrongs of my past. I knew the price I would pay and was glad to pay it, even eager. I knew that my action would separate me from her forever but this deed would be my choice. I showed her vengefulness and chill cruelty, and awaited abandonment. I anticipated coldness, expected rejection and horror.
But she shocked me. Threw me out of my complacent assumptions. She stopped my heart with how completely I had been deceived. She was no burden, no forgery, no facsimile friend. In my worst moment, she showed me only gentle pity, and offered a calming hand. I was astounded. This woman I thought I could predict! I knew no way to accept her kindness except through repetition of her earlier words. She humbled me as the rest of her kind could not.
And when that other woman returned, not dead - better dead, best in memory, best stilled by death and not pressing this knife to my core - Watson remained steadfast beside me and at the end, helped me see the extent to which my life in London was a lie, and how I wasted my love and my health on that falsehood.
Irene, thrusting into my new life like a jagged blade, unpeeled my careful layers. She skinned me, undid me with the damage done by her supposed kidnap, and then flayed me again with the discovery of her lies. I found her out, was repelled, but still her reticence, her refusal to end me, I could not understand. Watson did that. She is remarkable.
And Watson remains opaque to me. How can this be? We share this house and everything in it is as much hers as mine. I can observe her day and night, awake and asleep, but still she startles me - a word or a look, and I have to reassess her. Fascinating. And her work is valuable, her insights quite different to my own. She is my friend, precious to me in that, and she is amazing, the only person I consider my equal. When we are together, engaged in the work, we are at our best, and I imagine our partnership continuing, as I regrow the layers I have lost, and she stays steady and unwavering, yet still, for the present, mysterious in her motives, at my side.