Chapter 35
Chapter Thirty-Five
The front door closes, and the house goes quiet.
The patrol car starts up outside, the low rumble of the engine as the officers pull away from the kerb, and then nothing. No radio, no voices, no footsteps on the path. Just the silence of a house with a child’s bedroom sitting empty upstairs.
Alex is standing by the sink.
He hasn’t moved since the officers left – hasn’t spoken, hasn’t shifted his weight, hasn’t unclenched his jaw.
He’s watching me with his hands braced on the worktop behind him, and his expression isn’t anger, not yet.
It’s the thing that comes before anger in a man who keeps everything locked until the lock breaks.
I sit at the table with my coat still on, my muddy boots leaving marks on the tiles, and I wait.
‘A stranger in a bar,’ Alex says.
He’s too controlled, like he’s cross-examining someone in a meeting but already knows the answer. I’ve heard it through the study door a hundred times. I’ve never had it aimed at me like this.
‘Alex—’
‘You sat in front of two police officers and told them you’d snogged some random bloke. You told them I was confused. That I’d got the wrong end of the stick, that there’s no ex-boyfriend, no Ross, no threat – while our daughter is out there in the dark.’
‘I know what I said.’
‘Do you? Do you actually understand what you’ve done?
’ He pushes off the worktop and takes a step towards the table.
‘You’ve sent them away without the one piece of information that might help them find Olivia, and you’ve made me look like a paranoid husband who can’t tell the difference between a one-off kiss and a stalker.
In front of two officers. While our thirteen-year-old daughter—’
He stops. Presses his knuckles against his forehead and holds them there.
The guilt is so sharp I can taste it. He’s right. I know he’s right. I sat in that chair and lied, and the shame of it is crawling through me. But there’s a reason.
‘You know why,’ I say.
‘I know what you told me on the phone, Kim. I know you screamed at me not to call the police and I know you said the note says—’
‘It does say it. Look at it.’
I reach into my pocket and pull the note out. The paper is warm, creased, soft from being pressed to my thigh for hours. I unfold it on the table between us and smooth it flat with my palm. The block capitals stare up from the wood, black on white, neat and unhurried.
Alex stares at it. I watch his gaze move across the letters, and it’s different to hearing it on the phone – I can see that.
Hearing the words relayed by your panicking wife on a crackling mobile is one thing.
Seeing them written down in front of you, in someone else’s handwriting, on a piece of paper that was wrapped around a brick and thrown through your wife’s window – that’s something else.
His face changes.
The anger doesn’t leave, but it makes room for something underneath, something rawer. I see it arrive in his jaw first, then his eyes, then his hands, which go flat on the table either side of the note as if he’s trying to hold it still.
‘Your child’s life depends on it,’ he reads, quietly. Then again. ‘Your child’s life depends on it.’
‘That’s why I lied,’ I say. ‘That’s why I couldn’t give them his name. If he finds out I’ve gone to the police – if he’s watching us, if he knows—’
‘But I’d already called them.’ His voice is tight. ‘They were already here, Kim. They were sitting in this kitchen before you walked through the door. So what difference does it make? He knows. If he’s watching the house, he already knows.’
My stomach drops. Because he’s right about that, too, and I’ve been running from it ever since I pulled up behind the patrol car.
The police were here. They came in a marked car with a blue light on the roof and parked outside our house for over an hour.
If Ross is watching – if anyone is watching – they already know.
So what was the point? What was the point of the lie, and the shame, and the look on Alex’s face when I said there’s no old boyfriend? What did I protect?
‘I panicked,’ I say. It sounds thin. ‘I thought – if they start looking for Ross, knocking on doors, making calls, pulling him in – they’ll leave a trail. And he’ll know we ignored the warning. I thought if I kept his name out of it, maybe there was still a chance—’
‘A chance of what?’
I don’t answer. I don’t have one. The logic that felt so solid an hour ago, so urgent and clear, has come apart in my hands, and all I’m left with is a lie I told in front of my husband and two officers and a note on my kitchen table that says my daughter’s life depends on something I’ve already got wrong.
‘I should have told them,’ I say.
Alex pulls out the chair opposite me and sits. He doesn’t do it gently. The legs scrape across the tiles, and the sound goes through me. He picks up the note, holds it close, reads it one more time. His lips move over the words. His hand tightens on the paper, crinkling the edge.
‘Our old school,’ he says. ‘The school in Keynsham.’
‘Yes.’
‘His and yours.’
‘Yes.’
He puts the note down. Lays it flat, smooths the crease he made. His hands go to his face. Palms pressed to his eyes, fingers splayed across his forehead. His shoulders are rigid. His chest rises and falls once, twice, and on the third breath something gives.
He cries.
It comes out in a single, ragged sound – not a sob exactly, something rougher.
A noise I have never heard him make in fourteen years together, not when his father died, not when Olivia was born early and they took her away for tests.
Alex doesn’t cry. Alex stays level and processes and plans.
Alex is the man who tells me to drive carefully when the world is falling apart, who irons his work shirts the night before and hangs them on the wardrobe door in order.
And he is sitting at our kitchen table with his hands over his face, crying for our daughter.
I touch his arm. He flinches – just barely, a tiny involuntary jerk – and then he lets me continue. I close my fingers round his wrist and I hold on. His pulse is racing under my thumb.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘Alex, I’m so sorry.’
He pulls his hands away. His eyes are red, his face wet, and when he looks at me it’s all there – the fury, the fear, the love, the hurt – all of it layered up with no space between. I can’t tell where one ends and the next begins.
‘You should have told me,’ he says. ‘Weeks ago. The first time he contacted you, the first message, the first time you saw his face – you should have come to me and said, this man is back, and I need help. That’s what I’m for, Kim.’
‘I know.’
‘Instead, you hid it. You met him. You kept the whole thing from me for weeks, and now our daughter is gone, and I’m sitting here watching my wife lie to the police about why.
And I can’t even blame them for believing you, because the story you told was better than the truth, wasn’t it?
Kissed a bloke in a bar. Made it sound worse than it was to get my sympathy. That’s clever. That’s a good lie.’
The bitterness in his voice is chilling. I deserve it. I deserve every word of it. I opened the door to Ross one secret at a time, one meeting, one message, one silence, and the gap I left between us was wide enough for someone to walk through and take our child.
‘I was frightened,’ I say. It sounds pathetic.
But it’s the truth. ‘I was frightened of what you’d think.
Then I was frightened of Ross. And then the note – and by the time the police were sitting here, I was so scared of saying the wrong thing that I said nothing.
I chose the note over you. I chose it because the note was about Olivia, and she’s—’
‘She’s everything,’ he says. ‘I know. She’s everything to me, too.’
The kitchen clock ticks. The fridge hums. Somewhere outside a car passes on the road. Its headlights sweep briefly across the ceiling and disappear.
‘So what do we do?’ I say.
Alex picks up the note again. He holds it in both hands, elbows on the table.
I watch his eyes track across the words, and I can almost see the shift happening – the solicitor’s brain clicking in behind the father’s panic, sorting the pieces, laying them out.
He’s angry, and he’s terrified, but he’s also thinking, and Alex thinking is the most useful thing in any room.
‘He wants you at the school,’ Alex says. ‘Tomorrow night.’
‘Yes.’
‘Alone.’
‘That’s what it says.’
He turns the note over, as if there might be something on the back. There isn’t. He turns it back.
‘Tell me about the school,’ he says. ‘Not the memories. The building. Layout. Doors, windows, how you’d get in.’
‘Alex—’
‘If you’re going in there, I need to know what’s waiting.’
If you’re going. If. The word sits between us, and my stomach drops because he’s already past the argument.
He’s accepted it the way you accept bad news from a doctor – not because you want to, but because the alternative is doing nothing, and doing nothing while your daughter is missing isn’t something Alex Stiller is capable of.
‘It’s a secondary school,’ I say. ‘Standard layout – main block, gym, science wing. Two storeys. There’s a library on the first floor where Ross and I used to meet.
And there’s a window on the ground floor round the back, near the kitchens, that doesn’t latch properly.
Or it didn’t, twenty-odd years ago. We used to climb through it after hours. ’
‘Twenty years is a long time.’
‘I know.’
‘They could have replaced every window in the building.’
‘They could have.’
He puts the note down. Looks at me. And for the first time since the officers left, the anger in his face recedes far enough for me to see what’s underneath.
Not forgiveness or trust. Just a man who loves his daughter more than he hates what I’ve done, and is trying to work out how to use what’s left.
‘You go,’ he says. ‘Tomorrow night. You go to the school, and you do what he says, and you find out where Olivia is.’
‘And what do you do?’
‘I stay here. By the phone.’
‘And if something goes wrong?’
He doesn’t answer straight away. He stares at the clock, at the note, and then at me. His eyes are still wet. His jaw is still tight. But his voice, when he speaks, is steady.
‘Then I call the police back, and I tell them everything you didn’t. His name, the school, the whole lot. But that’s the last resort, Kim. Not the first.’
‘I know.’
‘You go after dark. Nine, half nine. Whatever window you used to use – you find it and you go in. And you bring her home.’
He says it like it’s a plan with steps and an outcome.
Go to the school, find Ross, get Olivia.
But I can see his hands on the table are trembling, and the muscle in his jaw is jumping, and I know that underneath the plan there’s nothing solid.
Just fear and love and the hope that doing the wrong thing for the right reason might, just this once, be enough.
‘All right,’ I say.
Alex nods. One short, hard nod. Then he stands and walks to the sink, runs the tap, and splashes water on his face.
He stays there with his hands gripping the edge of the worktop, water dripping from his chin, staring out at the dark garden where Olivia used to play on the grass in summer doing cartwheels while we watched from the kitchen window.
I fold the note and put it back in my pocket.
Tomorrow night, I walk into whatever Ross has waiting for me.
And I either come out with my daughter, or I don’t come out at all.