Dear Lost Summer

A world-famous psychic called Mike Baker told her three things. That she would meet her Twin Flame. That his initial was J. That they were two halves of one soul, come round again to find each other.

She met Ronnie.

Then there was his wife.

Thelma had been dead eight months.

Everybody in that town loved her. Soft, rooted, kind, installed; a woman who had been chosen and stayed chosen.

And Christine Hart; adopted at four, beaten by the woman who took her, told at twenty-six she would never have a child; drove west into Castlederg, Tyrone, fell in love with a grieving man, and began, against all reason and against her own decency, to hate a dead woman.

This is the letter she has been failing to write for twenty-two years.

It is not the version she has told since. There is no fate in it, and no ghost, and no curse.

There is only a prophecy she needed to be true, a dead woman she could not compete with, and a plain, unbearable admission she has never made to a living soul.

A TRUE STORY.

Christine Joanna Hart is a Sunday Times bestselling author, investigative journalist, former private investigator and certified psychotherapist specialising in trauma, based in Richmond, London. Her journalism has appeared in the Daily Mail and The Sunday Times. She has appeared on the BBC, BBC World Service, Channel 4 and GMTV.