The Marriage by K.L. Slater (any book recommendations TXT) 📕

his heart would surely stop of its own accord. And, when he did survive, he truly believed he wouldn’t make it through the next twenty-four hours.

But slowly, very slowly, he came to learn another lesson: how tenacious and indomitable the human spirit was.

From a place deep within him, a place he’d been completely unaware of, he’d felt a change gradually come. A quelling of the fire of injustice that raged in his heart, giving way to patience and finally – most importantly – an acceptance of the situation he found himself in.

This process had taken years, but after that, things became more tolerable.

Life on the outside and the family he’d left behind seemed like a fiction to him, a good story he’d once read and enjoyed. He found comfort in the pastel-coloured memories of long ago. His mother and her home-made tiramisu; the bitter-sweet memory of the clock repair workshop his dad had set up in the garage when Tom was a kid. He missed the times way back when he and his father would sometimes do stuff together. Before things became difficult between them.

His mum had visited him like clockwork in prison, twice a month. His father, grudgingly, once or twice a year. There had been times he wished she’d come less often, because it was so difficult looking into her eyes and seeing the hurt, the denial and, more than anything, the pure desperation to have him home again. She couldn’t accept that he had done the crime and must serve the time. Even now, ten years later, her viewpoint hadn’t budged an inch.

In all that time, nothing had really changed in here aside from the language the officers used. Prisoners were no longer ‘convicts’ or ‘inmates’. Now they often referred to them as ‘residents’. The concrete box he’d been living in was apparently a ‘room’, not a ‘cell’, even though he’d never been in a room so bleak and soulless.

Prison had largely been a desolate, miserable experience – until the last couple of years of his sentence at least. And then, about twenty months ago, in this place where nothing new ever happened, something had happened. Something that changed his outlook, his life and his entire future, thanks to the love and forgiveness of Bridget Wilson.

The news of their marriage would be a terrible shock for his mother, and that worried him, as her health had suffered with him being inside. She was on medication to treat both anxiety and depression.

But he refused to let that stop him from making a stand and putting an end to certain things that had gone on so long he almost didn’t notice them any more.

Like the way his mother talked to him as if he were a fifteen-year-old kid who needed her help, protection and care. What Tom really needed was to be given the space to build his own life again. During her last few visits, Jill hadn’t once asked him what he wanted from life in the future. Instead, she’d talked incessantly about her plans for him on his release.

She meant well, he knew that. She was trying to help him, the only way she knew how. But it was still hell to just sit there saying nothing and nodding in all the right places. Bridget had told him how she’d telephoned Jill and even called at the house a few months after Jesse’s death but his mother had put the phone down on her and shut the door in her face. Jill had never mentioned that on her regular visits; the only time she’d spoken Bridget’s name was scornfully, berating her for the publicity she was courting as a grieving mother who ran a charity.

Bridget had already told Jesse’s ex, Coral, and his son, Ellis, about the wedding.

‘How did they take it?’ Tom had ventured, almost not wanting to know.

Bridget had shrugged and said simply, ‘They’ll get used to it. They just need time.’

Telling his parents the news on the day of his release had seemed the obvious choice a few weeks ago, but now it was upon him, he felt apprehensive. A small part of him hoped that if he explained everything to his mother, she’d somehow find it within herself to give their marriage her blessing.

The visitors’ hall had definitely not been the place to tell her what he’d done. It had to take place outside the prison. He’d look her in the eye and explain why he wouldn’t be needing her help after all.

His life had transformed in ways he could never have imagined, and it was all thanks to Bridget and her unconditional love.

The door to the room opened and a security officer he hadn’t seen before appeared.

‘Ready, Mr Billinghurst? Your parents have arrived to take you home.’

It was the moment he’d dreamed of for so long. The moment he’d envisaged himself punching the air and yelling out in pure ecstasy at regaining his freedom.

Instead, with a fluttering sensation in his stomach, he picked up his rucksack and walked out of the door.

It was time to put the past behind him.

Eight

1994

It was the third week Bridget had attended the playgroup with three-year-old Jesse, and in that time, she’d been spoken to just twice. There had been the mum who mumbled ‘Sorry!’ as she’d dragged her small daughter away when the child ventured too close to Jesse, then the mother who told her when she arrived that the seat she was about to sit on wasn’t free because she was saving it for her friend.

Today, the playgroup seemed busier and noisier than ever. The venue was a large, carpeted room at the back of the library in Berry Hill, a desirable residential area on the south side of Mansfield. There was a £1 entry fee and the bus fare, which Bridget really had to think about seeing as she was on her uppers after being laid off recently from the supermarket. But Jesse got a glass of juice and a biscuit, and