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Sally is eight when her mum decides that she’s finally had enough and kills herself. She was there, in the bathroom with her six year old brother, hiding his eyes behind her tiny hands as daddy screamed through the door.
There’s a gun beneath the sink. Sally doesn’t know why it’s there, but she knows better than to touch it when she’s cleaning.
In the silence it takes for daddy to draw a breath, mum presses the barrel against her head and pulls the trigger. Blood pools around the tub and her brother starts crying but Sally doesn’t let him go, can’t let him go, so she just holds him tighter and wipes the blood off his face because it’s the only thing she can do.
Daddy doesn’t stop screaming.
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At fourteen, her brother throws glasses at her and tells her that it’s her fault mum is dead and daddy’s dying.
It cuts her face and lays sharp and broken against her feet but she doesn’t yell back at him. The last time she did he ran away and didn’t come back for a week.
Daddy coughs from the next room over. Sally turns her head to listen and when she does, the thick bottom of a glass hits her temple and shatters.
When she wakes up, her hands are bleeding and there’s no one home.
-
When she’s sixteen, Sally gets her first job. It’s at the market down the street and she mostly just bags, but it pays.
On the walk home, there’s an ambulance waiting outside with a couple squad cars. She tries to force her way through but one of them holds her back.
When everything’s been cleared away, he’s still there and he sits with her on the steps while she cries. “It was the drugs,” she says, and he doesn’t deny.
Sally is sixteen and entirely alone for the first time in her life.
The next day the officer checks up on her again and takes her out for pizza. She’s not sure whether to be happy or cry so she does both. He hands her a napkin and asks the waitress to get her a milkshake.
When he takes her home, he promises to buy her a pint in a couple of years as long as she doesn’t cry on him again. It’s a promise made and a promise kept.
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Sally is nineteen when she realizes that she’s infatuated with Detective Gregory Lestrade. She wouldn’t call it love, because she’s pretty sure it’s not, but it still comes as a shock.
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At twenty-two she sees Sherlock Holmes at his worst.