Too Good for this World by LK Chapman Page A

hadn’t been paying attention. She’d
probably just assumed they were on the desk because that’s where
they would normally be, and if they had been anywhere else it
simply hadn’t registered with her.
    She was
distracted from looking at Jonny’s last message to the world when
she heard her mum get home. She put the picture away carefully in
the drawer in her desk. Her mum disapproved of her looking at
Jonny’s suicide note. She said it was morbid and would do nothing
to help her move on. Reluctantly, Imogen decided she should go
downstairs. She didn’t feel like talking to her mum, but she found
people were more inclined to leave her to her own devices if she
made an effort now and then. If she shut herself away they started
to get worried; they started to think she might go the way Jonny
had.
    When she
walked into the kitchen she found her mum making a cup of
awful-smelling fennel tea and Imogen wrinkled her nose in disgust.
Her mum loved her weird teas, her superfoods, her herbal remedies
and horoscopes and tarot cards and helpful anecdotes. Imogen had
the sense that to her mum nothing was so catastrophic as to be
permanent, not even death. She spoke a lot about the world having
its own wisdom and its own designs. Apparently Jonny killing
himself was part of some design for Imogen. Her mum said that
people weren’t sent any tests they didn’t have the strength to deal
with, and that one day the grief would make Imogen stronger. Imogen
had pointed out that Jonny had clearly been sent a test too big for
him to deal with, but her mum had simply said, ‘Jonny was too good
for this world,’ and that was apparently that.
    ‘You know,’
Imogen’s mum said, ‘I was talking to a woman today who met her
second husband on one of those dating websites.’
    Imogen
rummaged in the cupboard for a jar of instant coffee and started to
make her own, more appetising beverage. ‘Is that right?’ she said,
careful not to show any emotion.
    ‘She said the
whole thing was a much better experience than she expected. Not
creepy or anything.’
    Imogen sat
down at the kitchen table. There was a stack of books in the
middle- one about herbs, one about mindfulness, one about eating
for better mental health, and one about the healing properties of
gemstones. Her mum had given her a gemstone last week. Amethyst.
For grief.
    While her mum
babbled on about dating sites, Imogen looked down at the gold
wedding band and sapphire engagement ring on her finger. Both were
second hand- Jonny wasn’t keen on buying new things. He’d said the
meaning was far more important than something new and shiny, and
that the fact these had been owned by somebody else meant that
their lives and their marriage were linked to the past, to the
larger world. She’d suggested that perhaps they’d been owned by
someone who had got divorced. ‘They weren’t,’ he’d told her, ‘I
asked the man in the shop. They were owned by a woman who was
married to her childhood sweetheart her whole life.’ Imogen had
never been sure how he could know this for certain, but Jonny never
told lies. Maybe the man in the shop had, though. That wouldn’t
have crossed Jonny’s mind. He thought everyone was as honest as he
was.
    ‘I had a look
at a few myself,’ her mum continued, oblivious to Imogen’s
disinterest, ‘some of them don’t seem quite right for… for you… but
there are others that match you really carefully, you just fill in
a personality-’
    ‘I don’t want
to talk about this,’ Imogen said.
    ‘Gennie,’ her
mum said, ‘listen to me. I know it’s hard, but all the signs are
that it’s time-’
    Imogen shoved
her chair back and stood up. ‘Jonny wouldn’t want me to go on a
dating site,’ she shouted, ‘he wouldn’t want me to put up an advert
for myself and try to sell myself to people. He… he hated
advertising!’
    For a moment
her mum was too astonished to speak. Imogen stood frozen to the
spot for a second longer, then, before her