Chapter 8 #2
Erin and Alex sat on the stone bench. The warmth of the sun felt strange on Erin's face, pleasant and wrong at the same time, because how could the sun be shining when Florence was missing?
How could the sky be blue and the grass be green and the dogs be wagging their tails?
The world's indifference to private catastrophe was something Erin had never quite reconciled herself to.
She'd seen it during her years in Protection.
The normalcy that continued around the edges of crisis.
Life going on. People eating breakfast and walking to work and complaining about traffic while somewhere, behind closed doors, someone's world was ending.
Frank spotted them and came running over, the sticks game immediately abandoned.
His hair was wild and his shirt had grass stains on both elbows and there was a scratch on his chin that he'd probably acquired from wrestling with one of the dogs.
He skidded to a halt in front of the bench and looked up at them with bright, searching eyes.
"Have you found Flo yet?"
The directness of it hit Erin in the chest. No preamble, no tiptoeing. Just the question, plain and fierce, from a boy who wanted his sister back.
"Not yet, mate," Erin said. She kept her voice even, warm, the voice she'd trained herself to use with the children when she needed to be honest without being frightening. "The team is working really hard. They're looking everywhere."
"But it's been a whole day."
"I know. Sometimes these things take time. But there are very clever people helping us and they won't stop until they find her."
Matilda had come over too, the chocolate lab trailing behind her. She stood beside Frank and looked at Erin with those quiet blue eyes that saw too much for an eight-year-old. "Is Florence scared?"
The question slid between Erin's ribs. She wanted to say no, darling, Florence is fine, but she didn't know that.
She didn't know anything about how Florence was feeling or where she was sleeping or whether the people around her were kind or cold or somewhere in between.
What she knew was that Matilda needed an answer that would let her sleep tonight.
"Florence is very brave," Erin said. "You know that. She practised that whole speech without blinking. She rides Percy through the woods. She's braver than most of the adults I know. And I think wherever she is right now, she's being brave and knowing that we're coming to get her."
Matilda considered this with the careful analytical attention she gave to everything. Then she nodded. "OK."
Frank was less satisfied. His jaw was set and his small hands were balled into fists and Erin could see the frustration radiating from his body like heat.
He wanted to do something. He wanted to fix it.
He was eight years old and his sister was gone and nobody would let him help and the injustice of it was written all over his face.
Erin glanced at Alex. Her wife was watching the children with an expression that was barely holding together: the smile fixed, the eyes bright with unshed tears, the hands gripping the edge of the bench so tightly her knuckles were white.
She was about to break. Erin could see it, the way she could always see it, the hairline fracture in Alex's composure that preceded the collapse.
"Right," Erin said, standing up. She clapped her hands once, the sharp sound startling the labradors into attention. "Who wants to play a game?"
Frank's head came up. "What game?"
"Capture the flag. Me and Matilda against you and Hyzenthlay. The flags are those two sticks over there." She pointed to two of the sticks Hyzenthlay had been arranging. "Boundaries are the bench to the oak tree. No tackling Audrey. She's Switzerland."
"What about Mummy Alex?" Matilda asked.
"Mummy Alex is the referee. No arguments with the referee. Her word is law."
"Her word is always law," Frank muttered, and Erin bit back a grin.
They played. Not the careful, measured way that the children played at formal events, performing for cameras, but the messy, shrieking, genuine way that children played when they forgot they were being watched.
Frank threw himself into it with the total commitment of a boy who approached everything at full speed.
He feinted left, sprinted right, grabbed the stick-flag, and held it over his head like a war trophy while Hyzenthlay shouted that the capture didn't count because he'd stepped out of bounds.
Hyzenthlay turned out to have a ruthless tactical mind and kept outflanking Matilda with strategies she invented on the fly, whispering instructions to Frank that were so elaborate they bordered on military operations.
The labradors joined in uninvited and kept stealing the stick-flags and running away with them, which caused Frank to chase them in furious circles while Matilda laughed so hard she had to sit down.
A golden retriever brought the flag back to Erin with its tail going like a metronome, and she accepted it gravely, as though it were a military dispatch.
Erin ran and shouted and let the game carry her for twenty minutes, her bandaged hand forgotten, her aching legs forgotten, and it was the closest thing to peace she'd felt since yesterday morning.
The sun on her face. The grass beneath her feet.
The sound of her children laughing. Alex on the bench with Audrey's great head in her lap, watching them, and for a moment looking close to herself.
But beneath the game, beneath the laughter, she was doing something else.
She was watching Frank and Matilda. Memorising them.
The way Frank ran with his arms pumping and his chin thrust forward, exactly the way Erin herself ran.
The way Matilda's ponytail bounced when she sprinted and how she always looked back over her shoulder before committing to a direction.
The scatter of freckles across Frank's nose.
The patient, serious way Matilda explained the rules to a labrador that had no intention of listening.
She was storing them. Building a library of details, the way she should have been building a library of Florence.
How many mornings had she been in the security room or on the phone with Helena's predecessor or reviewing briefing documents when she could have been on the floor with Florence and the Lego?
How many bedtimes had she missed? How many speeches had she not helped practise, how many pony rides had she not watched from the fence?
The thought was a blade that slid in quietly and twisted.
The details she did have came to her now with an almost unbearable clarity.
Florence's hand in hers last week, small and warm and impossibly trusting, as they'd walked through the palace corridor to the breakfast room.
Florence's voice at bedtime, grave and formal: Good night, Mummy Erin.
Thank you for today. The way she always said thank you for today, a phrase she'd invented herself at five and had refused to abandon, as though each day were a gift that required formal acknowledgment.
The smell of her hair after a bath. The weight of her on Erin's lap during Saturday films. The solemn way she'd lined up her toy horses on the windowsill in order of height, and the rage, genuine, incandescent rage, she'd displayed when Frank had knocked one over.
She had taken Florence for granted. Not her love for Florence, that was constant, enormous, the most powerful thing she'd ever felt.
But Florence's presence. The assumption that Florence would always be there.
That there would always be another bedtime, another ride on Percy, another solemn handshake before sleep.
That the steady accumulation of ordinary moments would continue indefinitely, and she'd have time, later, always later, to be more present for them.
The game ended when both stick-flags had been captured, lost, recaptured, and finally eaten by the chocolate lab, who carried the splintered remains under the stone bench and lay there looking triumphant.
Frank declared his team the winners despite having lost by two flags.
Hyzenthlay produced a detailed statistical analysis of everyone's performance that nobody asked for but that Erin found secretly impressive.
Matilda sat in the grass near Audrey and Alex and said quietly that it would have been more fun if Florence was playing.
The silence that followed was thick and painful.
"It would have been," Erin said. "And next time, she will be."
She said it with the certainty of a promise.
Not the fragile certainty of hope, but the iron certainty of a woman who had stared down threats for a living and never once blinked.
Florence would be found. Florence would come home.
And the next game of capture the flag would have four children and three dogs and two mothers and no one would be missing and the laughter would be complete.
Erin would make sure of it.