On Father’s Day 2017 I had a brutal lesson about loss. I was having a lazy day until my husband rang me on the landline from work, telling me my Mum had rung him, trying to get hold of me. She’d been trying my mobile, no, he didn’t know why, but I needed to ring her back urgently. He said she sounded upset. Concerned, I went upstairs to get my mobile from where I’d left it charging by my bed. As I came back out of my bedroom I could see her and my stepdad through the landing window, coming up the garden path. One look at her grey face and I knew someone was dead. I felt something go cold in my heart, and an icy trickle run down my spine. I opened the front door as they reached it.

‘What?’ I demanded, when really I meant who?

‘Sit down first,’ said my mother, ushering me towards the lounge. I didn’t want to sit down, but I did.

‘What?’ I demanded again once I was seated.

‘Dina’s dead, love,’ she replied. This wasn’t a time for fancy words, or hedging around the truth, but still my brain would not absorb what she had said.

‘What?’

‘Dina’s dead’. My world caved in. An instant interior implosion. In my mind my adult, responsible self, shattered like crystal glass and my inner child ran screaming through my brain knocking my thoughts and memories, decisions and dreams from their archives and processing shelves, leaving them in a tangle on the floor, then she continued to run through them, stamping and screaming. I became aware of a sobbing voice.

‘No, no,no,no,no,’ and realised it was mine, and my Mum was rubbing in my back.

‘I’m sorry love, I’m sorry,’ she was crooning over and over, but I had only just become aware of hearing her. My adult self snapped back into being; sharp broken edges from the shattering carefully facing inwards. They may slash at my heart and vital organs, but I was determined not to hurt anyone else.

‘How?’ I asked. I imagined accidents, murders, car crashes. ‘What about the children?’ Her beautiful babies, four and ten, so loved, so young.

‘They are fine. Her husband came in from work and found her in bed, dead. He rang me to tell me she’d gone. I thought he meant she’d left him. I couldn’t believe she is dead’. My mother is crying to.

I rang my husband, tell him to come home, now, but didn’t tell him why. I didn’t want him driving that upset. I stood a moment, pulling my lip, wondering where to start. I rang our other friend, the third spoke of our trio, and she screamed. I could not offer any comfort. I messaged our friends from university, apologised about the way I was telling them. They were bewildered. My husband arrived home, and I had to tell him. He didn’t believe me, and rocked on his heels stunned.

That’s the thing you see, she was so loved. Everyone who knew her loved her, she bubbled over with life and vibrancy. That couldn’t all be gone. Not yet. Not yet. She was only just forty two, I had seen her only a couple of weeks earlier, for a late Birthday lunch. We had plans, to go out at dancing, to open our own homeless hostel, to holiday in France together, so many plans. So much life left to live.

I met Dina on my first day at university, and she brought me out of the frozen shell that years of bullying at school had frozen around me. She taught me how to have fun, how to stop caring so much what other people thought, she brought spice and mischief into my world. I was like a hammock, with my life, my being hitched on four posts: my husband, my mother, and my two best friends and now one post was gone, and I was trailing in the mud.

Even while I hugged her husband that night, and sat with him as he gave his police statement about finding her, and heard him scream at the memory, I remained calm and helpful and only moderately tearful, but inside, inside that child raged on, throwing things on the floor, stamping important information into smithereens.

She was there on the following days as I helped choose what Dina would wear to be cremated, which casket she would like, what music should be played. And while I calmly picked a beautiful dress, and pointed to the wicker casket, inside she raged. I had helped Dina pick her wedding dress, her wedding songs, been to her three month scan with her, and stood beside her while she had her first proper look at her new born son. These were the things I helped with, not her funeral. We had never discussed it and I had no idea what she wanted, we had only ever talked about life. We had become adults together, then escorted each other to become wives, we had counted on cantankerous old age together, planned on scaring the neighbourhood children into believing we were witches.

This is why I disappeared for a while. It’s why I haven’t been posting blogs, or marketing my writing, and it’s why Book 2 has taken so long. You see, Dina was the first person I ever showed any of my writing to, my editor, and sounding board, and cheerleader. She was the Layla to my Rae. How was I supposed to write the next stage of their adventure when Dina would never read it? Never know what happened? Eventually I started writing again; I needed the healing it offered. I abandoned marketing, and anything that made me feel pressured or guilty and just wrote. The day I finally finished the first draft was a hollow victory I didn’t bother celebrating.

My inner child exhausted herself eventually. I don’t remember exactly when. There’s a lot I don’t remember from that time, while some things are stark and clear, strange shadowless memories. I still have a hole in my head and thoughts from the time around that dreadful day; things I learned just before that date are gone. I’ve given up trying to retrieve them. I dream about her frequently, dreams about trains she can get on, but I can’t. Dreams where she tells me she can feel her children through my arms. Dreams I wake up from gulping deep soul sobs. I’m still lame, still missing my fourth post, but I’m learning to live around the pain. I owe her, and I owe everyone who loves me, and I owe her babies.