The Ghost Between Us: Part Two

For a moment, I just stand there staring at the peeling paintwork, unable to steady my breathing. Because I thought she was okay. God, I really thought she was okay. She seemed happy. Healthy. Thriving, even. Photos online. Smiles. Nights out. Cocktails glowing under neon lighting. Carefully angled selfies suggesting effortless happiness and the sort of emotional stability people assemble when they desperately need the world to believe they’re fine. Tiny curated squares of life that looked sunlit from the outside. But that image of her standing in that doorway — hollow-eyed, muted, emptied from the inside out — brings every fear I thought I had outgrown rushing back through me. Old scars remembering how to ache. Then my mother appears beside me. One moment I’m standing alone outside the bedsit trying not to come apart at the seams, and the next she’s simply there, handbag over arm, looking as though she’s just wandered out of Marks & Spencer after a perfectly respectable browse through knitwear. “How was it?” she asks. A horrible little sound escapes me, barely recognisable as laughter. Air escaping a punctured soul. “Hmm,” I say. “Not exactly what I was expecting.” “No,” she replies. “I remember the hell you put us through.” Charming. “Not you personally,” she backtracks quickly. “Well. Technically you personally. But mostly when you were dating Phoebe’s father.” And there it is. Just hearing him referenced feels like stepping barefoot on broken glass buried deep in the carpet. You think you’re safely past it, years removed, healed over nicely — and then suddenly there it is again, slicing clean through the skin. That whole period of my life exists in fragments now. Bruises hidden under sleeves. Lies by habit. Fear becoming instinctive. Me slowly dissolving into somebody smaller. Quieter. Easier to control. A ghost wearing my own skin. My parents knew from the beginning he was bad news. Parents often do. But life has its own ugly momentum, doesn’t it? You can scream warnings at somebody drowning and still watch them swim willingly towards the undertow. Especially if the undertow keeps telling them they’re special. I became a shadow of myself. Every decision filtered through him first. Every thought carefully edited for approval. Until eventually I no longer recognised my own mind unless it was mirrored back to me in the shifting weather of his moods. And the worst part? It happened gradually. Nobody enters a relationship thinking: Ah yes. Lovely. Hopefully this ends with emotional annihilation and a lifelong anxiety disorder. It creeps. Control disguised as love. Isolation disguised as protection. Jealousy disguised as passion. Cruelty disguised as concern. A wolf in sheep’s clothing. Although honestly, by the final year, he’d lost the sheep act altogether. It eventually took my best friend Kylie physically extracting me from that house to save me from myself. I still remember it vividly. The Ford Fiesta idling outside. Bin bags stuffed with bare essentials, crammed into the boot. My hands shaking so violently I could barely zip my coat. “You need to leave him,” she told me firmly. “I can’t.” “You can.” “I can’t.” “I will not lose you.” There was something about the way she said it. The finality of her tone. And suddenly something dormant inside me draws its first breath in years. That ancient fight-or-flight instinct. I left terrified. Absolutely terrified. And the sickest part? Part of me still wanted to go back. Because abuse becomes normal eventually. That’s the horror of it. The cage starts feeling like home. The years that followed weren’t easier. If anything, I became more frightened — frightened of seeing him again, frightened of hearing his voice unexpectedly in public, frightened of being pulled back into his grasp before I even realised it was happening. Because trust me — it almost happened. More than once. He was convincing. Charming when he wanted to be. Dangerous when he wasn’t. And then came the courts. Jesus Christ. The courts. I was eighteen years old, fighting for my daughter’s safety while professionals in sensible shoes dissected my character like it was a case file on a desk. Every weakness highlighted. Every trauma weaponised. Meanwhile, he sat there calmly drip-feeding lies with ease. I was drowning, and everyone kept asking me to provide evidence of the water. There were supervised visits. Drop-offs. Endless fear. My parents stepping in because I physically could not face him without feeling like my bones were trying to leave my body. And the guilt of that still lives inside me. Phoebe deserved stability, but instead she inherited chaos wrapped tightly in love and held together with sheer adrenaline. Then one day I get the phone call. Phoebe witnessed him abusing another woman. And something inside me finally snaps clean in two. I stop contact immediately. Tell him — via text, because courage only stretches so far — that if he wants to see her again, he can go through the courts. His response arrives minutes later. She’ll find me when she’s older. I remember staring at that sentence for hours. Because deep down, beneath all the fury and the fear, I knew he was right. Children search for missing pieces. Even the dangerous ones. Especially dangerous ones, sometimes. Absence has teeth. And children will happily reach into a wolf’s mouth if they think it might answer questions about themselves. We moved to Coventry after that. I needed distance, safety, air — somewhere his shadow couldn’t casually reach across the pavement and tap me on the shoulder. And for a while, Phoebe thrived. There was lightness to her again. A softness. She laughed more easily. Started talking about the future with that wide-eyed optimism children have before life teaches them to expect less, to protect themselves, to lower their hopes just to stay safe. And when we eventually came home, she continued to thrive. At least on the surface. But you can only control so much. That’s the brutal truth of parenthood nobody tells you when they hand you a newborn wrapped like a burrito and send you home from the hospital with terrifying confidence. You are not raising possessions. You are raising people. And people eventually wander towards their own answers, no matter how many warning signs you nail to the path. She made contact with her father again without my knowing. I don’t blame her. God… absolutely not. How could I? She was too young to remember the fear. Too young to understand the full shape of what I had dragged us out of. All she knew was that somewhere out there existed a missing person with her eyes and surname. And absences ache. But when I found out they were speaking again, I knew instantly: I had lost my grip on the narrative. And God, that sounds controlling, doesn’t it? Maybe it is. But when you spend years building your child's safety with your bare hands, it’s difficult not to panic when somebody starts quietly dismantling the walls brick by brick. Everything I feared came true eventually. The poison. The manipulation. The slow rewriting of history. Her father drip-feeding bitterness into her ear until eventually she could barely look at me without seeing his version of me standing there instead. The teenage years nearly broke me. Watching your child drift further and further away while still living under the same roof. Watching her destroy herself in small increments. Watching her look at me like I was the villain in her story, like I had stolen something precious from her. And maybe, in some ways, I had. Only I had done it to keep her alive. Eventually she learned the truth herself, the hardest possible way, through violence at the hands of her own father. No child — no matter how old they are —should ever have to experience the moment a parent stops feeling safe. Afterwards, she could never quite see him in the same way again. But by then the damage between us had already settled deep into the foundations. We tried. God, we tried. Therapy. Days out. Long walks. Creative projects that neither of us ever quite finished. We laughed sometimes. Cried often. Circled the same wounds over and over trying to find the exact point where everything first started bleeding. But healing isn’t linear. And there are some wounds that never fully stop aching no matter how much time passes between us. Which brings us to now. Not exactly the mother-daughter relationship I once imagined. No spa weekends. No shopping trips. No spontaneous road trips across America with her calling me her bestie while we drank iced coffees and took blurry sunset photos “for the gram.” No. Life rarely gives you the glossy version. But somewhere along the line, we made peace with the quieter version. The real one. And maybe that has to be enough. Because despite everything — She survived. And somehow, against all the odds and several questionable coping mechanisms — So did I. At the end of the dream, I find myself standing outside the bedsit one last time. Night has fallen now. The windows glow amber against the darkness, nicotine-yellow light bleeding through thin curtains. Somewhere nearby, a siren wails briefly and then disappears again, swallowed whole by the night. I stare at the door. That awful door. Flaking paintwork. Rusted letterbox. A cheap brass number hanging crookedly as though it has given up entirely. Part of me wants to knock again. I want to hammer both fists against the wood until the whole rotten frame splinters apart. I want to drag her out into the cold night air and shake life back into her. I want to scream every warning I learned too late myself. Run. Leave. This is not love. I want to save her from becoming me. Because that’s the real horror blooming under the dream, isn’t it? Not just that she’s suffering. But that suffering has become familiar. Recognisable. Inherited. The same hollow eyes. The same shrinking posture. The same quiet surrender dressed up as exhaustion. And suddenly I understand something so painful it almost brings me to my knees. My parents must have stood exactly where I’m standing now. Watching from the outside while somebody they loved disappeared inch by inch behind a closed door they could not force open. Helpless. Terrified. Waiting for me to choose myself. I think of my mother answering late-night phone calls with carefully controlled calm while panic quietly tore holes through her insides. My father doing those awkward, practical things men sometimes do instead of speaking emotions aloud — fixing what didn’t need fixing, just to have a reason to keep seeing me. Loving me from a distance, because I had made closeness feel like something to fear. And God. What an unbearable thing it must be to watch your child walk willingly into the same fire over and over while knowing they won’t leave until the flames finally reach the bone. The urge to knock again nearly consumes me. Every maternal instinct rises at once. Go back. Fix it. Save her. But another part of me — quieter now, older somehow — finally understands what my parents understood all those years ago. You cannot rescue someone who does not yet see the edge they are walking towards. Love doesn’t always look like intervention. Sometimes it looks like waiting nearby with the light on. Trusting that eventually they will remember the way home. I take one final look at the door. And for a moment, I swear I see movement behind frosted glass. Phoebe’s silhouette. Still. Watching me leave. Then the light inside flickers once. Twice. Gone. I turn away from the building and start walking. My chest still aches. My stomach still twisted tight with helplessness. But beneath it all sits something else now too. Acceptance, perhaps. Or understanding. The cold air burns my lungs as I walk further down the road, past the smoking man in the vest, past the mould-streaked windows, past the mattress slowly soaking in the drizzle. And somewhere behind me, faintly — I hear the door unlock. But this time, in the dream, I keep walking.