CHAPTER 2
Hair. It’s hair, a real, proper knot of hair, on that broken front door. Simone reaches to touch it; she would know it anywhere. The precise thickness, colour, texture. It’s her daughter’s hair. So much of it, it would have caused such pain to come out.
She pulls gently and the clump comes away. She studies it, a soft curl sitting in her palm, and thinks that this is … that an injury has caused this.
Maybe it isn’t her hair. Maybe it was an accident.
Lucy hurrying to – to where? Back into the bedroom, and she starts to go through their family WhatsApp, set up by Damien, who sends earnest memes Lucy ignores but that Simone likes.
She makes notes of anybody Lucy’s mentioned this summer.
Within moments, she has a set of names scrawled in shaky handwriting on a piece of paper she found on the kitchen table.
People’s names, but no numbers. They exist on Lucy’s locked phone.
They’re strangers to her; Lucy’s summer friends.
Gone are the days of play dates and parents’ contact details.
And then she hears it: a beep. Simone bolts upright, grabbing for Lucy’s phone, but it isn’t that one. That one is still and dark, and this one is making a different sound. Tinny. Old-fashioned, a Nokia-type noise.
It beeps again, ringing, and her hand finds it instinctively, sliding underneath the pillow, the other going to her mouth, and there it is, buzzing softly in her palm like an insect.
Simone goes completely still as she holds it. A basic but modern flip phone with apps, its display contained in a window on the front showing CALLER UNKNOWN.
Simone breathes out. Please be a boy. Drug dealing. Anything. Please just come back, and be as bad as you like, she thinks, as she opens the phone like a clamshell.
‘Hello?’ she answers. Pulse racing.
‘Check messages,’ says a distorted voice.
‘Check messages?’ Simone repeats. ‘What messages?’
A pause – distinct, human breathing – then they hang up.
Simone stares at the phone.
‘What the fuck is this?’ she whispers to nobody.
Sure enough, a new noise. 1 message received, the phone says, again from UNKNOWN. Simone knows this is the moment that is going to change her life forever, and she presses Open and holds her breath. It takes a few seconds to load, two, three, four, and there it is.