Zara
AFTER
“Can I have a biscuit, Auntie Margot?” he chirps quietly.
“Finished, is it?” she asks.
“It’s finished.”
Margot nods, smoothing back her curls from her face. “Good. That’s good.” They sit in silence for a long minute before she asks, “What now?”
“I don’t know,” Zara says. Every inch of her body feels heavy.
It’s a question she’s wrestled with since they left the house, since the moment she stopped searching in the house’s rubble for Siobhan because there was no more Siobhan left to find.
So many times, she almost stopped working on the documentary, almost hit delete on the whole folder of footage.
But something keeps her going. She can never know how the truth will be received; she knows only now that it’s her responsibility to share it.
Somehow, rumours about the documentary are already circling – on the HexHeads forum, on social media.
She’s been receiving messages. Some are encouraging and positive, others are ridiculing, calling her a fantasist, a conspiracy theorist. One or two have been threatening.
They’re icy and detailed, so detailed they could only have come from previous guests.
Leave it alone, they warn. Keep the house’s secrets.
So much of her wants to bury the documentary, just as Siobhan did, to pretend she knew nothing about Hex House and Haina and all the things that happened there. But then she thinks about what doing just that did to Siobhan, and it hardens her resolve.
Zara, with Theo’s help, has been painstakingly hunting down women who’d been at the house.
Some were easy – Keiko, Janine, both living in Edinburgh now – others proved more elusive.
Some she’s still hunting for. She wants their permission before she does anything with the film, so she has to keep looking, has to keep searching for people who don’t want to be found.
She needs to tell Theo that she’s finally finished, that the documentary is fit to honour Siobhan’s memory.
And there is someone else’s permission she needs, too, someone she’s been delaying going to see for three long months as she’s pieced together everything that happened.
It’s almost time, she thinks, but not yet. There’s time to rest first.
In bed, she falls into a heavy, syrupy sleep, head fuzzing with static.
Next to her, Margot sleeps soundly. She rarely screams in her sleep anymore, but when she does, Zara rolls over to hold her, to whisper into her curls, You’re safe, you’re with me, you’re safe now.
At 6 a.m., Thomas climbs into bed between them, presses his warm, sleepy body into Zara’s.
When she wakes, he is watching her. His eyes are so like Elly’s – the eyes she’s seen peering curiously into the camera in so many of Siobhan and Theo’s clips – that it sometimes steals her breath.
“Shhh, Little Mouse, not yet,” Margot soothes from the other side of him, but Thomas is awake and wriggling now.
“Is today the day we go and find Granny?” he asks, and Zara senses Margot’s body stiffen. It’s a day they’ve both dreaded, but there’s no more putting it off now.
“Yes,” Zara whispers, pushing a russet lock of hair from his forehead. “That’s today.”
When it’s time to leave, Margot doesn’t want to go.
She stalks quietly around the flat like a pale ghost. She says she won’t come because she’s going to meet Keiko, but Zara knows it’s really because she can’t face the thought of being parted with Thomas.
Zara has struggled with the idea, too, but of all the decisions she’s had to make, she knows for sure that this is the right one.
Before they leave, Margot holds him close, so close that he laughs and squirms away. She turns before he can see her cry.
Zara packs a bag for Thomas – a few changes of clothes and his favourite toys just in case – and also brings her laptop with a version of the finished documentary on it.
They’re on a train from Edinburgh Waverley by midday.
She orders Thomas a babyccino from the coffee shop at the station, and he sips at it, like a tiny man on his way to work, a foamy moustache forming on his upper lip.
He asks her questions as their train pulls its way through the sleepy towns.
He’s always been so curious, but never so much so as today.
So Granny is Mummy’s mum? Yes, she is. And I’ve never met her before?
No, you haven’t. What if she doesn’t like me? She will love the very bones of you.
When they get to the final station, they hop on a bus and ten minutes later, they are in Elly’s village.
Zara grips Thomas’s hand tightly. It’s just as Elly had described it on tape – there’s the church where she married Ethan.
There’s the bakery where she worked, open today, the smell of bread just noticeable on the air.
There’s the place where the high street branches off to a smaller path that leads into the woods, the path Elly must have taken all those years ago, pregnant and still wearing her wedding dress.
Somewhere close, she knows, is the cottage she ran from on the night she found the house.
And closer still, the house where her mum still lives.
“Come on,” Zara says to Thomas, who grips her hand and follows her obediently.
He can’t know how significant this place is, not really, but she thinks he can sense it.
They walk down the high street, past the chemist and the corner shop and the post office.
When they come to a small white stone cottage on the corner, they pause outside the gate.
Zara stares down the path to the door, which is slightly ajar.
In the front garden, there’s a trowel and some gardening gloves by the rose bush.
She can hear the radio from inside. Zara waits, suspended between one moment and the next, knowing Elly’s mum is just a shout away.
That Theo has already been to see her, given her all the details he could bear to, told her that Zara will be coming. Ethan, he’s had less luck finding.
Zara feels almost unworthy of the power she knows she has.
Holding her hand is a grandson this woman has never met.
In her bag are the answers to everything that happened to her missing daughter.
It’s almost too much. Zara almost turns around.
But then the cottage door opens fully, and a woman appears holding a half-full mug of tea, her forearms streaked with soil.
She pauses in the doorway when she notices Zara and Thomas standing at the gate, her brow furrowed.
Her eyes land on Thomas, and Zara knows that she can see Elly in his mouth and his nose and his eyes.
Those wide eyes that are careful, so careful.
She knows in the way that only a mother knows.
She sinks to her knees and opens her arms out wide.