Deleted/Abandoned Storylines and Plot Twists - CHEMICAL
At one point about halfway through the story I was still toying off and on with the idea of having it turn supernatural at the end - with Tom, Anja, and the pub crew secretly being wolves (the original ending had them turning one final time). There are still small hints in the narrative that point to where it was going, including Emma’s side story, which was far more important in the original.
When Tom took Anja to visit his sister she often mentioned there being “others” with Anja that she could see. She claimed they were always with her but that they stayed hidden. The “others” were originally intended to be the wolf spirits inside her and Tom, and likely the rest of the pack, since wolves tend to stay together (in this case it was a spiritual connectedness, not physically having Ewan and Chris follow her around everywhere :P)
When I dropped the mystical subplot the “others” became Anja’s two sides - her original self before the brain injury, and her slightly different self after - both of which Emma could sense as separate presences. It was also Emma’s semi-clairvoyant ability to see/sense what was coming...her reference to Anja and Tom’s three future children, who were “with” Anja even though they weren’t born yet.
And by extension, Tom himself was one of the “others” she could see/sense inside Anja, since they were mated and bonded for life. So when Emma accidentally saw Tom in the hallway, she assumed he was a specter of that entity. It was only when she slipped back into something close to actual reality that his presence there scared her and she believed him to be the ghost of her dead brother. She also thought Pop was a future ghost of Tom as an older man, or what he would have been had he survived childhood.
I wanted to take Emma’s secondsight further but decided to leave it at the fact that she wasn’t bound to one reality and could slip easily (and sometimes accidentally) into other side-lives (and as a result could sometimes “see” slightly into the future) as a result of her trauma forcing reality to lose its grip on her.