Stolen

by Tess Stimson

  I stroke her hair back from her sweaty face, smiling as she wrinkles her nose and bats my hand away without waking.

  Mothering Lottie is the hardest thing I have ever done. It’s the only task, in my accomplished life, at which I’ve struggled to succeed.

  There’s no Hallmark coda to that statement, no but nothing has been more fulfilling. I don’t find motherhood satisfying or rewarding. It’s tedious, repetitive, solitary, exhausting. Luca was a much more natural parent. But my love for my daughter is visceral and unquestioning. I’d take a bullet for her.

  I check my emails as we sit in bumper-to-bumper traffic on the causeway across Tampa Bay, careful not to disturb Lottie.

  It’s as I feared: while I’ve been in the air, my Yazidi client has had her request for asylum denied, principally because she was unwilling to confer with her male legal counsel and participate fully and properly in the interview.

  I fire off several quick emails in response, setting in motion the steps necessary to lodge an appeal. I’m not being precious or egotistical when I say my absence from London has real-world consequences, and every minute I’m away from the office counts.

  But Marc put his entire life on hold for me when Luca was killed. He knows I don’t particularly like Sian, his bride; failure to attend their wedding, no matter how I might spin it, would test our friendship. And I’ll only be away six days. James can hold down the fort at work till I return. I’ll just have to pull a few all-nighters once I’m home to get things back on track.

  I put my phone away and gently reposition my daughter’s head in my lap as we take the exit towards the neon-lit drag of St Pete Beach, with its jostle of hotels, bars, chain restaurants and tourist shops.

  We turn off the main strip away from the crowds and into a more residential neighbourhood. A few minutes later, the taxi stops at a gate at the foot of a short bridge, which leads to a tiny barrier island a few hundred feet off the coast. The skyline is dominated by the Sandy Beach Hotel, a primrose-yellow, six-storey crenellated building that rises against the sky like a wedding cake.

  Our driver lowers his window to talk to the security guard and, after a moment, the white barrier is lifted and we cross over onto a tiny spit of land jutting out into the Gulf of Mexico.

  I shake Lottie awake as the taxi pulls into the courtyard in front of the hotel. A porter whisks away our luggage, and I pick up my drowsy daughter and carry her into the lobby.

  A huge wall of glass opens directly onto the white sugary beaches and Lottie instantly buries her face in my shoulder. She’s always been terrified of the sea; I have no idea why.

  A number of beachfront rooms have been reserved for the wedding party. I change ours to one overlooking the pool, so Lottie doesn’t have to wake up to a view of the ocean. A vivid orange and red sunset is spreading across the sky, and I’m just about to take my weary child upstairs when Marc and Sian come in from the beach.

  Marc pretends to ignore me completely and extends his hand to Lottie. ‘Miss Martini,’ he says gravely. ‘A pleasure to see you again.’

  ‘It’s Mizz,’ she corrects.

  ‘Mizz. My mistake.’

  Sian slips her hand through Marc’s arm. The gesture is possessive rather than affectionate. ‘We should be getting back to the others,’ she says.

  ‘Want to join us?’ Marc asks. ‘Paul was just getting in another round.’

  ‘I would, but Lottie needs to get to bed. She’s shattered.’

  ‘Why don’t you get her settled, then come back down and find us? We’re at the Parrot Beach Bar, just the other side of the pool. Zealy and Catherine are with us, too.’

  Thus speaks the man who has yet to have a child and learn what it is like to spend the rest of your life with your heart walking around outside your body.

  ‘She’s three, Marc,’ Sian says. ‘Alexa can’t just leave her on her own in a strange hotel.’

  Marc takes the handle of my carry-on bag with proprietary authority. ‘At least let me help you upstairs with this.’

  ‘Everyone’s waiting for us,’ Sian says.

  ‘You go back out. We’ll be down again in a minute.’

  His bride-to-be smiles, but it doesn’t reach her pretty eyes.

  There’s never been the slightest chance of a romantic liaison between Marc and me. We met when he started coaching the women’s football team at University College, London, where I studied law; for the first three years we knew each other, he only saw me sweaty and mud-spattered, in unflattering Lycra shorts and sporting a mouthguard.

  I’ve liked some of his girlfriends. But he’s let several good ones get away by missing the proposal window: by the time he’s realised they’re perfect for him, they’ve grown tired of waiting and moved on.

  Marc’s thirty-six now; a wealthy marketing director with every trapping of success bar a wife and family, and he’s been itching to get married for several years. Sian just happened to be the one holding the parcel when the music stopped.

  My phone rings just as I slide the keycard into the hotel room door.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘I wouldn’t take it, but it’s James—’

  ‘Go, go,’ Marc says. ‘I’ll get Lottie sorted out. Sian won’t mind if I stay a bit longer.’

  I seriously doubt that, but I need to talk to James and find out what’s happening with my client, so I take Marc up on his offer to look after Lottie, and go back along the corridor to take the call somewhere quiet.

  By the time I return to our room fifteen minutes later, Lottie is dressed in her pyjamas and tucked into one of the two queen-sized beds. Marc is perched next to her, reading her a story.

  ‘Ready to go down?’ he asks me, putting the book aside.

  I hesitate. I’m wired from my conversation with James and wide awake; a glass of bourbon would put that right. But even though I’m fully aware I’m not a natural mother, I do my best to be a good one.

  ‘I can’t leave her,’ I say.

  Lottie folds her fat arms crossly across her chest. ‘You didn’t read my story properly,’ she tells Marc. ‘You missed a page.’

  ‘It’s OK,’ I say. ‘I’ve got this, Marc. You go. I’ll see you tomorrow.’

  I settle down on the bed, leaning against the padded headboard and pulling Lottie into the crook of my arm. She hands me the book, Owl Babies, turning the well-thumbed cardboard pages for me as I read aloud the story of three baby owls, perched on a branch in the wood, waiting for their owl mummy to return.

  And she does, swooping silently through the trees: You knew I’d come back.

  Then I add the line that’s not in the book, the line Lottie’s been waiting for, the line that Luca, making up for my shortcomings, always used to add, with more faith than my history warranted: ‘Mummies always come back.’

  thirty-six hours before the wedding

  chapter 03

  alex

  Lottie wakes hours before dawn, still on London time. I toss her my phone, buying myself another valuable half-hour, and burrow back under the covers. Of all the many trials of motherhood, sleep deprivation is one of the worst.

  I never wanted a child. This doesn’t mean I don’t love the very bones of her now she’s here; Lottie is my oxygen, the reason I breathe. But I can’t be the only woman who didn’t see herself as a mother until it happened, and, if I’m ruthlessly honest, for quite a long time after she arrived.

  In fairness, I didn’t much see myself as a wife, either.

  Luca and I met nearly five years ago, in March 2015, a few months after he’d moved to the UK from his hometown of Genoa, in northern Italy, to head up the London office of his family’s coffee import business. In those days, I rented a ground-floor flat one street away from Parsons Green Tube station in Fulham with a couple of friends, and we were sick and tired of having our drive blocked by commuters dumping their cars in nearby roads before getting the train into central London.

  One evening, unable to drive to my father’s sixtieth birthday party
in Sussex until the owner of the car obstructing mine returned, I lay in wait, seething, and then exploded in the driver’s face.

  Italian to his marrow, Luca gave as good as he got. As I recall, our first conversation consisted almost entirely of imaginative swearwords in two languages.

  Sometime around the point I stormed back into the flat, grabbed a tub of Ben & Jerry’s ice-cream, and smeared it all over his windscreen, I noticed how good-looking he was. Our encounter descended into clichéd rom-com meet-cute: he asked me out to dinner, I accepted, and we ended up in bed.

  At the time, I was twenty-four and had just started full-time work at Muysken Ritter. I was putting in eighteen-hour days, six and often seven days a week. I didn’t have time for a relationship.

  But Luca was charming, well-travelled, and fun. I enjoyed spending time with him. The sex was excellent, and I found myself refreshed and more productive after a night together. It was easy to fancy myself a little bit in love with him.

  Or perhaps I really was; from this distance, it’s hard to be sure.

  Some four months after that first, cystitis-inducing night, I discovered that, thanks to a bout of food-poisoning and consequent antibiotics, I was six weeks pregnant. If I didn’t have time for a relationship, I certainly couldn’t cope with a baby. I booked a termination, and told Luca, because I felt it would’ve been dishonest not to, not because I expected him to have a say in the matter.

  To my astonishment, he fell on bended knee and asked me to marry him. I rather wounded his pride by laughing.

  He was Italian, of course, and Catholic: for him, the idea of abortion was anathema. He begged me to keep the baby, promising he’d do all the childcare, I’d ‘barely know the baby was there’.

  He was passionate, and persuasive.

  And I was young enough, and arrogant enough, to believe I really could have – and do – it all.

  And then there was my sister, Harriet. At the age of nineteen, she’d been diagnosed with cervical cancer, and although the aggressive chemotherapy treatment saved her life, it’d rendered her infertile. It was impossible not to have her tragedy at the forefront of my mind when I made my decision.

  The next time Luca proposed, I said yes. Reader, I married him – twice. We moved into a two-bedroom terrace in Balham, turning one of them into a nursery, and set about building our little family. And when it all fell apart, as it inevitably did before we’d even reached Lottie’s second birthday, I took it on the chin and put marriage and children on the list of experiments worth trying once, but never repeating, along with parachute jumpsuits and floral tea dresses.

  I’m woken a second time when Lottie flings the phone at my head. It makes brutal contact and I sit bolt upright, rubbing the side of my skull. ‘Fuck!’ I exclaim. ‘What did you do that for!’

  ‘You’re not listening to me,’ Lottie says.

  ‘Damn it, Lottie. That really hurt.’

  ‘I don’t want to be a bridesmaid.’

  I fling back the bedcovers. ‘I don’t give a damn what you want. You said you’d do this, and you’re going to.’

  ‘My blue mummy says I don’t have to.’

  I have no idea what she’s talking about. ‘Well, this mummy says you do.’

  I need to pee, but when I try to open the bathroom door, it’s jammed shut. I kneel down and prise out the dozens of bits of paper Lottie has shoved beneath it, an irritating habit she started in the traumatic aftermath of her father’s death. She does it with any door that doesn’t fit tightly to the floor, convinced monsters are going to slide between the gaps. She refuses even to go into my parents’ kitchen, because the door down to the cellar has a half-inch gap she can’t block.

  ‘For heaven’s sake, Lottie. I thought we’d talked about this.’

  She hunches her shoulders, juts out her chin and glares at me mulishly.

  I use the bathroom and then come back and sit on the edge of her bed. ‘What’s going on, Lottie?’ I say, my tone brisk. ‘You’ve been looking forward to this wedding for months.’

  ‘I don’t like Marc any more.’

  ‘Since when?’

  Her scowl intensifies. ‘He touched me.’

  Nothing, but nothing, in more than ten years of friendship, has ever given me cause to doubt Marc. Not by a glance, insinuation or chance remark has he suggested his tastes run towards children. But when your daughter tells you a man has touched her, you take it seriously.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I ask sharply. ‘When?’

  ‘Last night. I didn’t like it.’

  My mouth dries. I can’t believe Marc would ever, but then it’s always the ones you least suspect.

  Lottie has many faults but I’ve never known her to lie. Her default position is to tell the truth and shame the devil. The thought that anyone may have touched her, hurt her, is enough to ignite a murderous rage in me. I would go to the ends of the earth to protect my daughter.

  ‘Where did he touch you?’ I ask, as calmly as I’m able.

  ‘I’m not telling.’

  I want to grip her by the shoulders and shake the details out of her, but she’ll simply refuse to talk to me if I pressure her. Her longest retributory silence to date lasted three full days, when she punished me for trying to establish what she wanted for her third birthday. She wasn’t the one who caved to end the standoff.

  ‘OK,’ I say, getting up again.

  ‘He was very rude,’ she says.

  ‘What sort of rude?’

  ‘He squeezed me!’

  ‘Squeezed? You mean, like a hug?’

  ‘No!’ She gathers a fistful of her ample belly in each hand. ‘Here! Like this! He said I was getting chunky!’

  I’ll deal with the fat-shaming aspect of this clusterfuck later. Right now, I’m just relieved I don’t have to accuse my best friend of molesting my daughter on his wedding day.

  ‘He’s only saying that because he’s marrying an ironing board,’ I say.

  ‘She does look like an ironing board,’ Lottie agrees delightedly.

  ‘You should feel sorry for him, really.’

  ‘All right. I’ll be his flower girl.’

  ‘Good,’ I say mildly.

  The wedding rehearsal starts at six tonight, an hour before sunset, the same as the actual ceremony tomorrow. It’s still not yet seven in the morning, which gives me eleven hours to fill without allowing Lottie to eat herself sick, drown, get sunstroke or cut off the hair of any of the other four bridesmaids (quite within the realms of possibility; there was a rather disastrous incident with the paper scissors her first term at nursery school).

  I’m not optimistic.

  chapter 04

  alex

  I’ve never really understood Lottie’s fear of the ocean. There was no childhood trauma in the sea that might have triggered it, no near-drowning incident, and water itself isn’t the problem; she loves the pool and has been able to swim without armbands, even well out of her depth, for almost a year.

  But this is a beach wedding and Lottie has to get used to the nearness of the sea, so, after lunch, I fortify myself with a stiff gin-and-tonic (full disclosure: not my first of the day) and take her down to the beach.

  Fortunately, although her chin goes down and her shoulders hunch forward so that she resembles a bonsai charging bull, she doesn’t detonate as I’d feared. We walk slowly towards a raked section of powdery white sand, where the hotel staff is setting out rows of beribboned gilt chairs in front of a wedding arbour entwined with plastic starfish and shells. I lead Lottie down the sandy aisle she will tread at the wedding rehearsal in a couple of hours, and show her where she’ll sit in the front row tomorrow.

  ‘There’s no tide here,’ I explain, crouching down beside her as she stares towards the ocean, her features grimly set. ‘Well, not much of one. The sea isn’t going to come any closer, I promise.’

  Lottie takes a firm step towards the shoreline, which is about six metres from where we’re standing. Trust my girl to face
her fears, challenge them head on.

  I hear Sian’s voice behind me. ‘Are you going for a swim, Lottie?’

  Sian and her best friend and maid of honour Catherine are picking their way across the hot sand in matching pink flip-flops, their wet hair slicked back from their faces after their dip in the ocean.

  ‘We’re just on our way back to the hotel to get ready,’ I say.

  ‘But the sea’s so warm,’ Sian says. ‘And she’s got plenty of time before the rehearsal.’

  ‘It’s an ocean, not a sea,’ Lottie says.

  Sian crouches next to her. ‘I hope you’re not worried about people seeing you in a swimming costume, Lottie. No one minds what you look like.’

  I want to smack Sian across her pretty face. But I need not worry; Lottie has the situation handled.

  ‘Why would I be worried?’ she asks bluntly.

  ‘Never mind,’ Sian says quickly. ‘Are you afraid of sharks, then?’

  ‘Of course not!’ she retorts. ‘I like sharks.’

  ‘She’s got no reason to be scared,’ Catherine says. ‘They’d take one bite of her and spit her out.’

  Lottie appears to view this as a compliment.

  My phone vibrates in my pocket as Sian and Catherine return to the hotel. I’m surprised to see my sister Harriet’s name on the screen. ‘Lottie, sit here and don’t move while I talk to Aunt Harriet,’ I say, pointing to a nearby sunlounger. ‘I’ll only be five minutes.’

  I take a couple of paces towards the shoreline, tempted by the sea. The warm water ripples over my bare feet and I find myself wishing Lottie could get past her fear; the water really is perfect.

  ‘I wasn’t expecting to hear from you,’ I tell my sister. ‘Is everything all right? Are Mum and Dad OK?’

  ‘As far as I know. Why?’

  ‘Because you called me!’

  ‘Shit, sorry. Must have been a butt dial.’ Harriet sighs. ‘I thought something must be wrong when I saw the missed call.’