Chapter 13
THIRTEEN
KAT
After three days, I’m back in the library. Try as I might at home, I can never get into the headspace to work in the cramped flat. Avoiding telling Ellie the truth about Heart Eyes, the stalker, and my past is also painful. It’s like swallowing down the truth is giving me an ulcer or something.
But the library brings a calm I sorely need.
I close down my assignment, I’m failing to make any useful advance on it anyway, and pull up my search engine.
It’s not the first time I’ve searched for that slice of my past. Over the years, late at night when the memory surfaced, I’d reach for my phone and hunt for a name.
Or a face. For something that would solidify that summer as more than a childhood memory.
After that day, he disappeared. I had no idea what had happened to him from the moment we parted that evening. I still don’t. I’ll need to find out.
Since chasing off the stalker and guarding my window, I hadn’t seen him. The occasional feeling of being watched passes over me, but otherwise, he’s remained distant. Which means the burning questions I have piling up in my head go unanswered.
This time is different. I might not have his name or his face, but I know he made it out the other side of his childhood. But who else could know about me? And does that person know about him, too?
Focus, Kat.
I type what I know into the search box, in a variety of different permutations.
The name of the cottage on the edge of my parents’ estate, my parents’ details, the date they lived there, and the name of the local village.
As far as I remember, he never attended the school, nor was he allowed to leave the cottage.
Few people were aware he even lived there.
The library empties, and I’m only half aware.
No one had come looking for them. There was never a knock at my parents’ door requesting details. Not even the police, like I’d feared for so long. Some people get looked for, others don’t.
A few results further down the page, I come across a small article. A social worker filing a report on behalf of a minor. A child taken into care following a parental abandonment. A mute child, no name given.
Like he’s a footnote, barely worth a mention.
It doesn’t give me anything I don’t already know. Not if anyone was kind to him. Whether things were better after than they were with his dad. Not his name.
I sit back and sigh. I need to talk to him.
I want to know his name.
I want to know everything.
My obsession only increases now that I know he’s nearby. Heck, if I knew where he lives, I’d stand outside his goddamned window and watch him sleep. Knowing he’s okay would settle the churning in my stomach.
There are things I can’t bring myself to search.
The fight ring. What the winner was made to do to the boy who lost, while grown men jeered.
I’d only dared get that close to the cottage once, standing on my tiptoes at the dirty, cobweb-covered window while I searched for my silent friend.
Scrubbing the corner of the window with the sleeve of my cardigan until it was nearly black with grime. I’d cleared a section and peered in.
A bare yellow bulb cast a glow on the skin below. Men with bottles of beer around the edge of the room, boys in their laps, hands where even I knew they didn’t belong.
My friend on the floor beneath a bigger boy, who beat his nose bloody.
I didn’t understand everything I saw. At that age, how could I?
But I understood enough to know I needed to tell a grown-up.
Branches tore at me, tears flowing as I ran all the way home, my sobs filling the forest air. I threw myself into Martha’s arms, screwing my nose up at the sour smell of wine on her breath.
My words came out in a jumbled mess as I told her what I’d seen. The fighting. The nakedness.
She slapped me.
Hard enough that I stumbled and hit my head on the kitchen cabinet.
You haven’t seen anything. Do you understand me?
For years, I thought she was protecting me by punishing me for being out so late or teaching me how to behave better. Now I wonder who she was actually protecting. Whether she’d known more than I did about what went on in that cottage, and what it meant that she hit me rather than helped me.
My parents had never known.
They had so little knowledge of what went on in my world. I was assigned to Martha, and she had full control of my rearing until I was at a more acceptable age to handle.
Martha is a different question.
She retired shortly before I turned sixteen. Moved away with only the occasional Christmas card for the first few years, and then even those stopped. I don’t know where she is. I don’t know if she’s even still alive.
Had she mentioned what I saw to anyone else? Or was she somehow involved deeper than I knew?
Which brings me back to who else could know? Who penned those notes?
I told no one. Not Ellie, not my parents, not the therapist I’d been sent to at nine years old when my nightmares were at their worst. I’d sat in that room once a week for a year and talked about everything except what happened.
Eventually, they’d signed me off needing more attention from my parents.
True, but nothing to do with the nightmares.
Lifting my necklace, I press the heart stone to my lips while I think, an old habit.
What did you miss?
That last afternoon. What didn’t you see?
I’d told the boy to go walk on the road, far away from the house and never say anything. I went home, and lay under my blankets, waiting for them to come for me.
And waited.
For years.