Chapter 1
SARAH
I wake with a start, eyes flying open, breath catching in my lungs. For one glorious second, the warmth in the pit of my stomach remains. Then it’s gone – grains of sand washed away by the reality now crashing through me.
My chest tightens and my first breath is shallow against the hollow pain.
Thirteen years, ten months and nine days.
I repeat the numbers in my head another three times. Thirteen years, ten months and nine days since I last saw Abigail – my beautiful daughter with her wild brown hair and mischievous smile.
In the early days, I counted the hours too.
Three.
Ten.
Twenty-four.
Forty-eight.
Seventy-two.
On and on and on as we waited for news that never came. Words never spoken.
Found. Safe. Unharmed.
For a moment the pain is a knife wound in my heart threatening to engulf me, but I grit my teeth and force it back into its box.
It doesn’t want to go; it never does, like a toddler bucking against the pushchair, refusing to be strapped in.
But I am stronger than this pain and I will not allow it to beat me today.
I throw back the covers and pull on yesterday’s discarded jeans and an old green jumper, out of shape but too warm and familiar to ever throw away.
Every night when I close my eyes, I will the dream to come, desperately longing to see Abigail, to be back in that moment, but when it does, the day that follows is so much harder.
Escape. The word whispers in my thoughts. I need to get out.
‘Barley,’ I whisper, glancing at the digital clock on the nightstand. It’s only a few minutes past five.
His long floppy ears twitch, but he doesn’t move from the bottom of the bed.
‘Barley,’ I say again.
My voice seems loud in the silence. Not even the boiler is humming into life.
It will be 8 a.m. before Michael emerges from our bedroom – his bedroom now I suppose.
Rebecca will be up in an hour, allowing herself time to do her hair just so and rehearse for the school play before Michael drives her to school.
Fifteen years old and one year away from her exams.
As for Daniel, he’ll swing out of bed when it suits him.
I try to remember if he has lectures today but the timetable always seems to change.
When he’s not studying computer science at the local uni, he’s picking up shifts at the bar in town, coming home at all hours.
Sometimes days will pass without me seeing him.
I feel a pang for the gaps in his life he doesn’t share with me.
The friends and relationships, the life he has outside of this house.
I know all of Rebecca’s friends. I know where she goes and when she’ll be home.
But Daniel, at twenty, shares little of his life with us.
It’s normal. I understand, but still there’s an ache for how it used to be when he’d tell me all about his day at school and the lessons he liked.
When he’d sit in bed with me and show me the sketches he’d done of a bird that had caught his eye or a car he liked.
I shake the thought away and turn to Barley. ‘I know it’s early.’
Barley stretches his front paws but refuses to open his eyes. His soft apricot fur is brown in the dim light of the bedroom.
‘Walkies.’
The word cattle-prods him to life. He whips around, half tumbling, half leaping from the bed and beats me to the door.
One, two, three, four… Barley’s small body whips around my heels as I count the steps along the hallway and down the staircase, all the way to the kitchen and the mudroom beyond it. Fifty-five.
Sometimes counting helps to fill the silence, to keep the thoughts I dare not think at bay.
I wonder how many steps I’ll count today, how many blocks of time, how many tiles on bathroom walls, and a hundred other nonsense things.
Sometimes it helps, sometimes it doesn’t, but either way it’s a habit now.
By the time I open the back door and step into the darkness of the morning, the box in my mind is shut tight and my thoughts are my own again. I draw in the first deep breath of cold spring air blowing across the Essex countryside and feel ready to face whatever the day will throw at me.
A laughable thought in hindsight. I could live a thousand lifetimes and nothing could’ve prepared me for what was coming.
* * *
Keep reading here!