Chapter 18 #2
She kicked the door.
The first kick jarred her leg from ankle to hip and made her teeth clang together and accomplished nothing.
The lock held. The door didn't move. She stepped back, adjusted her stance the way she'd been taught in field training two decades ago, drew her leg back, and kicked again.
This time the frame cracked, a sharp, splintering sound that echoed across the water.
The third kick drove the door inward with a crash that shattered the silence of the grounds and sent the wood slamming against the interior wall and knocked one of the lavender pots off its ledge.
It hit the gravel and broke and the smell of lavender rose into the cold air like a signal.
Inside: warmth. The smell of wood smoke from a small stove in the corner.
A single room, larger than it looked from outside, furnished as a self-contained cottage: a sofa, an armchair, a kitchenette along one wall, a bookshelf.
Rugs on the floor. Curtains at the windows.
A lamp on a side table, the source of the glow she'd seen from the house.
A woman was standing up from the armchair, her face a mask of shock and fear.
Middle-aged, grey-haired, wearing a cardigan and reading glasses.
A book was tumbling from her lap. She was opening her mouth to speak or scream and her hands were raised in front of her in the automatic gesture of a person confronting an intruder.
Erin didn't look at her.
She looked at the bed.
It was against the far wall. A narrow bed, made up with white sheets and a patchwork quilt.
And in the bed, sitting up now, blinking in the sudden light and the cold air rushing through the broken door, her hair tangled from sleep and her blue eyes wide and confused and beautiful and alive, was Florence.
The world stopped.
Six days. One hundred and forty-four hours.
Eight thousand six hundred and forty minutes of searching and waiting and raging and breaking and holding on by her fingernails while the world tried to tear her apart.
Six days of every nightmare scenario cycling through her mind on repeat, of pressing Florence's sweater to her face to remember the smell of her, of lying awake at three in the morning imagining things she would never tell anyone.
Six days of holding together because she had to, because people were depending on her, because if she broke then nobody was looking for Florence.
And here she was. In a bed. In a summer house. Blinking at the light. Alive.
"Mummy?"
The word broke Erin open. She crossed the room in three strides and she had Florence in her arms before the syllable had finished, lifting her from the bed, pulling her against her chest, wrapping herself around her daughter's small body with both arms and holding on with a force that was probably too tight but she could not make herself let go.
Florence was warm and solid and real and she smelled of soap and clean pyjamas and underneath it the particular, unmistakable Florence-smell that Erin had been carrying in her lungs since the morning on the bridle path.
"Mummy. Mummy, you came."
"I came, baby. I'm here. I'm here."
Florence's arms went around Erin's neck and held on with the desperate, full-body grip of a child who had been waiting and had not been sure anyone was coming.
Her face was pressed into Erin's neck and her breath was warm and quick against Erin's skin and she was crying, not loud, not hysterical, but the quiet, relieved tears of a small person whose fear had just ended.
"I knew you'd come," Florence said. Her voice was muffled against Erin's neck. "I told Mrs Allard. I told her my mummy would come."
Mrs Allard. The governess. Erin looked at the woman over Florence's head. The woman had sunk back into the armchair, her face grey, her hands trembling, her reading glasses askew. She looked like a woman who had known this moment was coming and had not been able to prevent it.
"Are you hurt?" Erin held Florence at arm's length, examining her face, her arms, her hands. Searching for bruises, cuts, anything. "Did anyone hurt you?"
Florence shook her head. Her eyes were red and her cheeks were wet but her face was whole and her body was intact and she was looking at Erin with those blue eyes, Alexandra's eyes, wide and trusting and so beautiful that Erin's vision blurred.
"No. Mrs Allard was nice. She read me stories and she let me have biscuits and she let me have Charlotte's Web and The Secret Garden.
But I wanted to come home. I kept asking but she said I couldn't. Not yet.
She said it was like a holiday but it didn't feel like a holiday because there was no Percy and no Audrey and no Frank and Matilda and no you and no Mummy Alex.
" Her voice wobbled on the last words and fresh tears spilled down her cheeks and Erin wiped them away with her thumb, gently, the way she'd wiped tears from Florence's face a thousand times before: after scraped knees and bad dreams and arguments with Frank about whose turn it was on the swing.
"You're coming home now. Right now. And Percy is waiting for you. And Audrey. And everyone."
She pulled Florence back against her chest and stood up and the girl's weight was nothing, was everything, was the most important thing she had ever held.
Eight years old and small for her age and light enough to carry for miles and Erin would have carried her across the entire county if that was what it took.
She held her daughter against her shoulder and walked toward the broken door, past the governess who didn't move and didn't speak and whose face said she knew exactly what was coming for her, past the bookshelf and the sofa and the small stove with its dying embers, out through the splintered frame and into the night.
The moonlight fell on Florence's face. She blinked at the sky, at the stars, at the willows and the water and the dark shape of the estate house in the distance.
She'd been inside for six days. The night air on her skin made her shiver and Erin pulled her closer, wrapping her own jacket around Florence's small shoulders.
"Is Mummy Alex here?"
"She's close. She's waiting for you. I'm taking you to her right now."
Florence pressed her face back into Erin's neck. "I missed you. I missed everyone. I missed Audrey."
"Audrey misses you too. She's been moping around the castle looking for you. She'll be so happy when you come home."
She was walking back up the slope toward the main house, her daughter in her arms, her boots leaving dark tracks in the silver grass.
The moon was high and the stars were sharp and the air was cold and Florence was warm against her chest, warm and breathing and alive and talking, asking about the dogs and the horses and whether Frank had been annoying, the ordinary, beautiful, mundane questions of a child who was returning to her life.
Erin was crying. Properly crying, for the first time since this had started, tears running down her face and into Florence's hair.
She didn't try to stop them because they weren't grief anymore.
They were something else entirely. Relief, maybe.
Or gratitude. Or the simple, overwhelming joy of holding the thing you love most after being told you might never hold it again.