Nothing But Questions

I was hungover.

That's how it starts. Not with a stranger, or a locked door, or a house at the end of a track with no signal. It starts with me, face down on my bed at half eight in the morning, deciding that my sister could wait.

Hannah was going to look round a house, miles from anywhere, with a man she'd never met. She wanted me with her.

You're the witness, she said.

So I sat in the car.

Three years on, our mother doesn't remember that Hannah existed. The police have given me back a box of her belongings and a monthly phone call that tells me nothing. Every possible line of enquiry, they said. Then they stopped saying anything at all.

I know what I saw that morning.

It's everything before it that I got wrong.

They were investigating Hannah's murder.

I'm investigating Hannah.

Nothing But Questions is written from the victim’s side of the glass. It isn’t a detective story where every answer is neatly handed over. It’s about what’s left when a family gets fragments, silence, and just enough truth to hurt.

Sometimes the point is that people don’t get the answers they’re looking for. Sometimes all they’re left with is exactly that: nothing but questions.