Page 73 of Beautiful Ugly

“They decided it was time for men to stand down. It was a gradual process, but when someone died—like the pub landlord—the Isle of Amberly Trust would advertise for a suitable replacement. Opportunities to run a pub on a remote Scottish island are rare and surprisingly popular. The all-female board of the trust would sift through the applications and select a candidate who was best qualified to take over. And it was always a woman. Often women in need of a second chance. Same with the butchers, and the bakers, and everywhere until all of the islanders were women. An extreme example of positive discrimination but with the best of motives.”

“So Arabella was the victim of domestic abuse you wrote about for the newspaper? And Cora really was in prison before—”

“It was the family of the man Cora killed who were sending me anonymous threats. They didn’t like what I wrote about them. Almost everyone now living on Amberly is here because they were running away from something. Or someone. Women come here when they need to leave their old life behind and start again. It’s a refuge. A safe place where they don’t need to be afraid. There’s no war, there’s no hate, there’s no crime, and there’s no poverty. A handful of the women who live here now are people I met as a result of my work, people I interviewed who needed help, who Midge then read about because she collected every newspaper article I ever wrote. Cora, Alex, Mary. Arabella arrived with her whole life packed into one suitcase after her husband beat her so badly she nearly died. Her sister, Sidney, had experience running a puband came with her. Together the islanders work hard to maintain ownership of Amberly, not for themselves but because they believe they owe it everything. As do I. The island doesn’t judge you. It doesn’t care who you were, or who you think you are. It doesn’t make judgments based on how you look, what you believe in, what you do, or how much you think you are worth. The island treats everyone the same. The island takes what it needs from people and gives what it can. Amberly is home to women who were wronged by the world. A place of hope when all hope is lost. Everyone who lives here will do anything to protect it.

“I’m going to get another drink. Are you sure you don’t want one?” Abby asks. She grabs the empty glasses and starts to leave the room.

“You said everyone on the island was running away from something or someone,” I say. “So what were you running away from?”

She turns back and stares at me. “You.”

TOUGH LOVE

ABBY

I pour myself another glass of whiskey in the kitchen and take a sip. I think when a relationship unravels, the way ours did, it’s impossible not to look back and wonder who was to blame. To relive the good times as well as the bad and wonderWhat if?A broken record of whys regularly spins inside my head but never plays the answer.

Memory lane is a dead end but if I close my eyes I can still remember the people we used to be. I can still feel his hands on my body, pulling at my clothes, impatient to unwrap me. Those first few years when we were together were the most passionate of my life. He had this way of making me feel as though I were beautiful, even the parts of me that never were.

I never wanted to leave my husband forever, that wasn’t the plan, but I knew I had to leave when I did. I have needed to put a physical distance between my past and my present more than once in my life, and sometimes there is no way back. My white lies have darkened over the years and my past caught up with me. There were things I should have said, but didn’t, because they were things he didn’t want to hear. But when what happened, happened, it was too late to tell him anything. I just had to go. I’ve always felt guilty about that—leaving without even saying goodbye—just disappearing from his life.

I know a lot about people disappearing, and not just because I did. Someone is reported missing every ninety seconds in the UK. That’s 170,000 people reported missing every year, and that’s just this little corner of the world. Sometimes when people disappear it’s because they don’t want to be found. I needed a fresh start, so I changed my name and started again, determined to become the me I knew I wanted to be. I’m old enough to know that tough love isn’t real love. The truth is that my life without him was less lonely than life with him, and I know in my heart that I did the right thing.

Grady has always believed what I say. It’s something I’ve always been baffled by—given how difficult he finds it to trust almost all other people—but I liked how it made me feel. For a while. As though he thought I was special. I’ve always found relationships hard to navigate, even as a child. I grew up in a home where there wasn’t quite enough love to go around, so I looked for it elsewhere. And I learned most of life’s lessons the hard way, but making mistakes is how we learn.

It felt strange coming back to the island after all these years. It was even stranger to visit the cabin when Grady wasn’t there and to be surrounded by my husband’s things. It made me miss him a little, but not enough to regret my decision to leave.

There are things I need to tell Grady tonight.

Things which will be difficult for me to say and for him to hear.

Truth is stranger than fiction and tends to hurt more too.

ORIGINAL COPY

GRADY

I wait for Abby to come back, my head too loud with unanswered questions. There are so many things I miss about my wife. Strange things. I miss the way she danced around the kitchen when she cooked. I miss her dark sense of humor and the way she would never apologize even when she was wrong. I miss waking up next to her. I miss how she said “I hope you die in your sleep” every night before we went to bed, and how I would say it back because it was our way of saying “I love you.” I miss everything about who she was and who we were but now I wonder if I ever really knew her at all. This woman isn’t like the Abby I knew, she’s more like an original copy of the woman I loved.

“Was the baby I heard crying at The Croft and saw in the church yours?” I ask as soon as she walks back into the room.

“Yes. Holly is my daughter.”

“But she isn’t mine?” I already know that she can’t be, but when Abby confirms it by shaking her head I still feel a strange sense of loss. I do my best to compose myself. “And are you really married to a woman?”

“Legally no—I’m still married to you—but in my heart theanswer is yes. I met Travers here on Amberly and I love her very much.”

She waits for that news to sink in, but I’m not sure it ever will.

“Why did you pretend not to know me at the pottery? Was it you I saw on the ferry the day I arrived? Why are you doing this to me? Why am I here?”

“You’re here to write a new book and now you have.”

I hear the familiar crackle of a walkie-talkie. Abby takes it out of her pocket, places it on the table, and stares at it before looking back at me.

“Time is running out, Grady.”

“What does that mean?” She doesn’t answer. “You’ve clearly lost your mind. Thisisa cult. I don’t understand what is going on here—you’re all crazy—but I demand to leave.”