Chapter 37
Chapter Thirty-Seven
The school looks smaller than I remember.
That’s the first thing that hits me, standing on the pavement across the road with my hands in my pockets and my heart going so fast I can feel it in my wrists.
The building is the same – the same brick, the same flat roof, the same row of windows along the first floor that used to glow yellow when the heating was on and the caretaker hadn’t done his rounds yet – but it’s shrunk.
The wall I remember as enormous is chest height.
The gates I remember as imposing are just gates.
And the sign by the entrance, which used to feel like the border of an entire country when I was fifteen, is peeling at one corner and lit by a street light that flickers every few seconds like a dying pulse.
I’m stalling. I know I’m stalling.
It’s ten past nine. The sky has been dark for hours – a smear of dirty orange above the rooftops from the street lights.
Alex dropped me at the end of the road five minutes ago.
He didn’t want to. He sat in the car with the engine running and his hands on the wheel, staring straight ahead, jaw locked, and said, ‘I should be going in with you.’ And I said, ‘The note said alone,’ and he said, ‘I know what the note said,’ and neither of us spoke after that.
He drove away, and I watched the tail lights shrink and disappear around the corner.
Now it’s just me, the school, and whatever’s waiting inside.
I cross the road.
The side entrance is the one Ross and I used to use – a narrow gate set into the wall between the main building and the gym block, hidden from the road by a row of bins that the caretaker lined up every Friday and the wind scattered every weekend.
The bins are different now, big green wheelie bins instead of the old metal ones, but they’re in the same spot, and the gate behind them is the same gate.
When I put my hand on the top of the wall to pull myself up, the brick is cold and gritty under my fingers in exactly the way it always was.
I’m over before I’ve let myself think about it.
One foot on the bin lid, both hands on the wall, a scramble that’s harder at thirty-eight than it was at fifteen – my arms burn, my boot scrapes the brick, and I land on the other side with a jolt that goes up through my knees and into my teeth.
The yard is dark. The tarmac is cracked, patched in places, with weeds growing through the joins.
A basketball hoop stands at the far end with no net, the backboard tagged with spray paint I can’t read from here.
Everything smells of damp, cold concrete, and bins.
The window is at the back of the building, round the corner from the kitchen entrance, ground floor, second from the left.
I could find it blindfolded. I could find it drunk, or asleep, or years from now with my memory gone and nothing left but muscle and instinct.
Ross and I used this window a dozen times: summer evenings, winter afternoons when the school was empty for INSET days, once on a Saturday night in November when he dared me and I couldn’t say no because saying no to Ross was a skill I never learned.
I reach it and stop.
It’s the same frame. The same aluminium handle, the same single pane with the rubber seal that’s perished along the bottom edge.
The latch was always the problem – it didn’t sit flush, the mechanism was worn, and if you pushed the frame in a certain way and jiggled the handle upwards at the same time, it popped.
Ross showed me. He put his hands over mine and guided them.
The latch clicked, the window swung open, and we climbed in over the sill and dropped on to the kitchen worktop on the other side, giggling like idiots, thrilled by the stupidity of it.
I press. I jiggle. The latch pops.
Twenty-odd years, and nobody’s fixed it.
The window swings inwards on stiff hinges, and the smell hits me – school smell, that unmistakable cocktail of floor polish, dust, old radiators, and something sweet underneath that might be paint or might be the ghost of a thousand packed lunches.
My eyes sting. Not from the smell but from the memory of it, and the girl who used to breathe it in and think this was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to her.
I climb through. My hands find the worktop – it’s steel now, not the old wood.
I lower myself down and stand in the kitchen in the dark.
The room is different: new units, new flooring, a serving hatch that wasn’t there before.
But the door to the corridor is in the same place, and when I push it open, the corridor is exactly as I left it.
Long. Dark. Lockers on the left, classrooms on the right. The floor is the same poured resin they had when I was a student, and my boots make a sound on it that bounces off the walls and comes back to me like a second set of footsteps. I stop. Listen. Just the echo, fading.
I start walking.
The corridor runs the length of the ground floor and meets a staircase at the far end.
The library is upstairs, first floor, at the back of the building – a big room with tall windows and rows of shelves, and a carpet that used to be blue and is probably something else now.
I know exactly where I’m going. My feet know.
They’re carrying me along this corridor the way they’ve carried me a thousand times before, past the science rooms and the toilets and the display boards, and my mind is somewhere else.
My mind is fifteen, and it’s a Tuesday lunchtime, and Ross is waiting for me at the top of the stairs with a book he’s stolen from the English department and a look on his face that flips my stomach.
The memory is so vivid it becomes a physical, precise pain, like pressing on a bruise I’d convinced myself had healed.
I can see him. Dark hair falling over his forehead, blazer sleeves shoved up, leaning on the wall with one foot flat against it.
The grin. The way he always looked like he knew something I didn’t.
I loved him so much it frightened me.
The staircase is ahead. I take it slowly, one hand on the banister, testing each step before I commit my weight.
The building creaks around me – pipes, or the roof settling, or the sound old schools make at night when the heating has been off for hours and the structure is contracting in the cold.
The darkness up here is thicker. No street light reaches the first-floor corridor, and the windows along the far wall show nothing but black sky and the faint shapes of rooftops.
I can see the library doors.
They’re at the end of the corridor, double doors with wired glass panels, and there’s light coming through them.
Not bright, not overhead-strip-light bright, but warm, golden – a lamp, maybe, or something battery-powered, set up to cast just enough glow to see by.
The doors are open. Both of them, pushed flat against the corridor walls, held in place, and the light is spilling out across the floor and reaching towards me like a path.
Someone is expecting me.
I stop walking. My feet stop, my breath stops, and I stand in the dark corridor ten metres from the open doors, and I feel every single thing at once.
The fear. The anger. The love – because Ross was my first love, and you don’t walk towards that without feeling it, even now, even here, even when every part of you knows better.
The guilt. The shame. The fierce, bright terror that what I find in that room will be worse than anything I’ve imagined.
And underneath all of it – underneath the fear and the fury and the mess I’ve made – there’s Olivia.
My daughter. My girl. Thirteen years old, scared, alone, waiting for me in that room, and every second I spend standing in this corridor is a second she’s still waiting.
I walk.
The corridor swallows the sound of my boots.
The light from the library grows, and I can see the carpet now – not blue any more, grey, industrial – and the edge of a bookshelf, and the corner of a table, and the high windows along the back wall, black and glossy with the night outside.
I can hear something, too, a small sound, muffled, rhythmic.
It takes me three more steps to recognise it.
Breathing. Someone breathing through their nose, hard and panicked, the way you breathe when your mouth is covered.
I step through the doors.
The library is smaller than I remember, but everything is tonight.
The shelves have been rearranged, pushed to the sides, cleared from the centre of the room to make a space that wasn’t there before.
A lamp is sitting on a desk in the corner, angled towards the middle of the floor, and in the pool of light it throws there is a chair, and in the chair there is my daughter.
Olivia.
She’s bound. Wrists behind her back, ankles taped to the chair legs, tape across her mouth – silver tape, thick, stretched tight over her lips and around the back of her head.
Her eyes are huge. Wide, wet, terrified.
She’s in the hoodie Alex said she was wearing when she left home yesterday – the oversized grey one with the frayed cuffs she won’t let me throw away.
Her hair is matted on one side, and there’s a mark on her cheek, red, raw, where the tape has pulled at the skin.
She sees me.
The sound she makes goes through me, hard and sharp.
A muffled sob, trapped behind the tape, her whole body jerking forward against the bindings.
Her eyes lock on to mine, and they say everything – Mum, Mum, help me, please, I’m here, I’m scared, get me out – and I am across the room in three strides, reaching for the tape, my fingers finding the edge of it at her wrist—
‘Hello, Kim.’
I freeze.
The voice comes from the left side of the room, behind the shelves, where the shadow is deepest and the lamp’s light doesn’t reach. It’s quiet, calm, almost soft. A voice I would know if I heard it underwater, in a crowd, in a dream, in the dark.
I turn.
Ross steps out of the shadow. He’s standing with his back to the wall, arms at his sides, watching me.
His face is half lit by the lamp – one side gold, one side black – and he looks the same and he doesn’t.
Older. Thinner. Harder around the eyes. As if since meeting me again, his body has reacted by accelerating the ageing process.
What worries me most is his expression. I can’t read it. I have no idea what he’s thinking, what he’s planning, or what he’s going to do.
‘I wasn’t sure you’d come,’ he says.
Behind me, Olivia sobs behind the tape.
And I am standing in the library where I fell in love for the first time, with my daughter tied to a chair and the boy I loved standing in the dark, and the only thought in my head – the only one, drowning out everything else, louder than the fear, louder than the fury, louder than the years of silence that brought us here – is this:
What have I done?