How Do I Love Thee? Read Free Page A

how many steps I took, the light didn’t get any closer. Then I heard a set of soft tapping, chipping and scratching sounds behind me, so I turned—and saw a crooked line of gravestones, each crowned with a smiley-faced post-it-note.
    The trail led me onto the dewy grass and into the mist for a short way, then through a vast field of red roses where every thorn was a razor-wired cupid’s arrow, until I reached a pure-white building with a sign on the red door, which labelled the back entrance of the hospital as a morgue.
    Beside the door, in the middle of the path, was a fresh gravestone, with a man on his knees, bent away from me, chipping at the headstone with a hammer and chisel as if his life depended on it.
    Drawing closer so I could read the engraving over his shoulder, and already terrified that I knew what I’d find, I saw that it
was
my name—or would be, just as soon as he finished squeezing the second
s
into Hossted.
    He spun around and grinned up at me with those sparkling brown eyes and that five-o’clock-shadowed smile that always manages to make my skin ripple with anticipation. Then I noticed that I was blushing, not only embarrassed to appearnearly naked before him, but also from guilt, since I never felt this kind of thrill with my poor husband.
    ‘Marty?’ I asked, stepping closer. ‘Why didn’t you ever mention you were a doctor?’
    ‘Not important.’ He rose and pulled me into his arms. ‘What do you think of that? Some idiot misspelled your name, so I fixed it. That’s how much I love you, Emily, let me count the ways …’
    He broke into song, balladising my favourite poem from memory, having seen it only once recently as far as I knew, framed in my living room.
    I glanced to the gravestone, engrossed by his resonant voice, and was relieved to notice the date of death was blank.
    ‘I’m not dead yet,’ I said, wondering why he—or my romanticised illusion of him—wasn’t devastated to think that I might be. Surely he would have noticed that I hadn’t passed him in the hall on my way to work that morning?
    ‘You’ll be dead soon enough,’ he promised flatly.
    His smile widened and I couldn’t tell if he was being sinister or matter-of-fact.
    ‘We’re all going to die eventually, I hope you mean?’
    In response, he dropped with me, putting us both on our knees, all the better for me to read the whole epitaph while still clasped against his broad and usually reassuring chest:
    Here lies the body
    Of Emily Hossted,
    Dated a killer
    And now she is dead!
    I screamed, but that damned light blinded me again, making me wince.
    ‘I told you she wasn’t up to it,’ I heard Death complain to Detective Symes. ‘Not as bad as the last seizure when they lowered her over the balcony, but she’s still on very shaky territory. I’ve dosed her enough to steady her heart and dull the pain without knocking her out, but if you can’t do this without triggering another event, I’m kicking you out of here. Are we clear?’
    ‘Sorry,’ Symes said, replying to me instead. He took off his hat and shook it twice. ‘I’ll be quick as that if you can answer me this …’
    But why hadn’t I noticed that funky retro pinstriped hat before? Oh, hang on, I had. He was wearing it in that hit-man caricature I drew earlier in my subconscious. Funny that.
    ‘I need to know how you first met.’
    ‘Who, Marty?’ My teeth chattered, only this time it had nothing to do with electric shock and everything to do with that bad feeling that was stirring in my gut again. ‘Let me think, I …’
    I stared at the bed sheets, thinking back to a year ago, to that cloudy day when sunshine appeared briefly in my life before the hurricane.
    I’d been out on the footpath outside my apartment building, on my back under my car—Roger’s classic Monaro—with only my legs protruding while I tried to disentangle the long string of a kid’s yoyo that somehow had managed to tangle up in my undercarriage—and no,