She sat in a room, up to her elbows in memories.It had been a bedroom, once. The little room, just off the kitchen, had become a storage area, a place to quickly stack and hide things when there was no time to put them away properly. A room full of forgotten things. Things that were too important to throw out, but not important enough to have a place. The previous owner of the room, who was as elusive as smoke, had left his mark on the space. A strange collection of nothing, of unknown origin, and an equally unknown value. An intimidating tribal mask, a stuffed monkey who stared from unseeing eyes, a purple bowtie and a shiny golden top hat decorated with an elaborate peacock feather. The girl glanced around the room. Books had been piled up the walls, the covers torn, their titles faded into age spotted, water marked irrelevance. Piles of newspapers sat in precarious stacks dating back before her sixteen years. Tarnished trophies in shoeboxes, hard earned medals that had meant everything once and meant nothing now. Cardboard boxes full of Christmas paper and fairy lights, boxes full of the memory of happiness and festivity packed away into a corner. Abandoned childrens games, which had been well loved in their time but forgotten, left in the room to gather dust. There was something about this room, something different. It seemed to hang in the air, to look out from the shadows. A presence that one could not quite feel. The fleeting image out of the corner of ones eye that one can never quite catch. A woman sat there too, her grandmother, her eyes swimming with memories as she flipped through an album of black and white photographs. She wasn’t as young as she used to be; her liver spotted, age warped hands caressed the face of a man pictured standing confidently in front of a foreign building. The man was the epitome of masculinity, a strong jaw and defined features separated him from the others who stood around him, who were nothing but blurs to the woman. The ghost of regret hovered at her shoulder. The old woman’s story was told on her face, in every wrinkle and with every line, in every crease and shadow, if only one cared to look close enough, and not many did. Today was the day the girl would be told the reason her grandmothers smile didn’t quite reach her eyes. The woman called the girls name. Together they sat and looked at the man in the photo, until at last the woman began to speak. “A lady's imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony, in a moment.” They met in a bus shelter, of all places. She had missed her bus, optimisitcially staring out the window of her office, waiting for the lashing rain to stop. When she could wait no more she dashed out of her sanctuary and into the street. That’s when she met the man. The man with the face she would never and could never, forget. After that one meeting they met again and again, he was a sailor by trade, his family and teachers had told him he was wasting his talent on sailing, he had been the top of his class, but something drew him to the sea, the vastness, the emptiness, the mystery. Money wasn’t an issue to him; he had no need for a lot of it. Nothing could make him stay on land for more than a week, two weeks at most for Christmas. Nothing changes a man like a woman. Within a month of meeting her he hadn’t caught sight of the ocean once, and it didn’t bother him one bit, he promised he would never leave her, even for the swirling hypnosis of the sea. He didn’t bore his family at the dinner table with wind direction and sea swells, instead they were told endlessly about the woman. How wonderful she was, how much better his life was now that he had her. He no longer spent his time rigging fishing lines, he was barely at home, and when he was, his mind was elsewhere. He saw the sea in her, in her beauty, in the way she moved. He wanted more than anything to marry her, but couldn’t afford a ring. She had smiled and said she didn’t mind, that his love meant more to her than any ring. "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife" The second man, the suitor, stepped into her life with a determined stride, so quickly that she didn’t have time to think about it. He gave her beautiful bouquets of deep red roses, the first man had only given her bunches of wild flowers. The suitor gave her exquisite presents of boxed and ribboned chocolates; the man had only given her coloured shells from the sea. The last gift came in a tiny velvet jewellers box, and sparkled so dazzlingly that the woman forgot all about the first man, just for a second. “In vain have I struggled, It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you.” She told the man, one night, in a restaurant, when the wedding was fast approaching. She thought that maybe if they were in public he wouldn’t cry. The man didn’t cry, he crumbled. She married the suitor, now the husband, one crisp winters morning. The union lasted three years, long enough for her to bear two children, but not long enough for her to learn to love him, the way she thought she could. All the roses and chocolates in the world werent enough to fill the hole in her heart the man had left. Instead there was a darkness, a swirling gloom that was slowly spreading, like a ruthless disease. She didn’t see the man again, or maybe she did? Out of the corner of her eye, in a busy street...was that him? That man, right there. Dont you see him? The man with salty hair and weathered clothes. The man with the single tear rolling down his suntanned face. She saw him some days, and every night. He was the ghost that haunted her, the regret. The news had reached her that he had died shortly after her confession, a sailing accident. He never left her, just as he had promised, and she was never the same. She dreampt dreams of the life she could have had, the life she did have, for that short time. The swirling fog never left her; it followed her around like a determined, menacing cloud, a constant reminder of what she had done. The girl noticed the lines on her grandmothers face for the first time, looked closely enough to appreciate the pain in her smile, the smile that didn’t quite reach the shadow of remorse in her eyes. She sat in a room, up to her elbows in memories