Nicole
Nicole
Nicole hears the police officer’s words, cautioning her seventeen-year-old son, feels as though she has stepped into someone else’s life.
The kitchen door flings open, and there are Abby and Jack, standing in the doorway, and it takes a moment for Nicole to absorb what she is seeing; she thought Abby left the house fifteen minutes ago, that Jack was safely upstairs, ignorant of all that was taking place. Abby’s hand grips Jack’s arm as though to restrain him from making their presence known, and Nicole can see immediately from their expressions – Abby’s horror, Jack’s fear – that they have heard too much already.
She pulls Jack towards her, wraps an arm around his shoulders, leaves Abby standing alone by the door.
For a few seconds, nobody speaks.
It is the male officer who breaks the silence. ‘Mrs Richardson, we asked you to leave. It’s not appropriate you being here. Nathaniel, we’ll need you to come down to the station to be interviewed under caution.’
Nicole watches Nathaniel’s eyes widen, sees his terrified glance towards Andrew, then to her. She registers the alarm in Jack’s expression, watches him open his mouth to speak but no words emerge. She perceives the fury in Abby’s furrowed brow, the pain these revelations are causing her. And even though all this happens in a matter of seconds, it is as though everything around her has slowed down, as though she is watching it in decelerated time. As though the moment is being protracted beyond all comprehensible bounds to punish her for what her family has done.
‘Mum...’
The desperation in Nathaniel’s voice jolts her back to reality: back to the frame of time in which sixty seconds fill a minute, in which two police officers are arresting her son for a crime she knows – beyond any reasonable doubt – he did not commit. The words blurt from her lips as if they have a life of their own.
‘It wasn’t Nathaniel. It was me. I was driving. I killed Isla.’