by Elle Croft
He swallows hard. I do the same. Loathing for those parents builds and increases, the same feeling I get every time I acknowledge the truth of what happened all those years ago, but I push it down. I’m well rehearsed in keeping this particular truth at arm’s length.
Ruben shifts uncomfortably in his seat and looks at his shoes.
‘Yeah, OK,’ he says quietly. ‘I remember now. We learned about it in training.’
‘So your Imogen is a Sanders kid,’ Troy confirms, clearing his throat. ‘And you just thought to tell us now?’
‘Look,’ I say, anger clawing its way up my chest. ‘We’ve spent her whole life trying to protect her from the truth. And, more than that, we need to protect her from her biological parents. We can’t risk them knowing where she is. And, honestly, we just didn’t think it was relevant to her disappearance.’
My voice cracks, and I clamp my hand over my mouth.
Dylan moves closer to me and rubs my back in slow, calming circles. I focus on the warmth of his hand, on the way my skin feels when my T-shirt moves across my back. I remind myself to keep my mind on the small, real details. Not the what-ifs.
‘So,’ Ruben says hesitantly, ‘what changed? Why are you coming to us with this now?’
‘Kat found this today,’ Dylan tells the two policemen, offering them a printout of the attachment I was emailed, while continuing to stroke my back with his other hand.
The two men lean in towards each other so they can both read the document at once.
Troy whistles. ‘She got a DNA test?’
‘Looks that way,’ Dylan replies. ‘Which means she knows she’s not our biological daughter. We have no idea what made her think to do the test, or how much she knows about who her real parents are. I honestly don’t know how she’d have found anything out – her name was legally changed when she was about eighteen months old, and we’ve only told a few of our closest family members, who would never breathe a word. We’ve checked in with them, and they assure us they haven’t said anything to anyone. So we don’t know if it’s relevant, but we thought it’d be better to let you know in case it’s connected, somehow.’
‘We appreciate that,’ Troy says. ‘Do you know when she got the results?’
I shake my head. ‘I got them to email it to me, but I had to pretend to be Imogen. And I can’t get into her computer to check.’
‘That’s OK. It would be helpful if we could take her laptop back to the station with us. We might be able to get a better idea of what she knows about her past. And don’t worry, we’ll look into this thoroughly.’
‘Please don’t tell anyone you don’t have to,’ I say, my tone pleading. ‘If she doesn’t know, we want to keep it that way, at least for now. It could put her in danger if anyone else found out. Especially the media.’
‘Of course,’ Ruben promises, his tone reassuring. ‘We’ll make sure this information is need-to-know only.’
I fetch Imogen’s laptop from her desk, and we spend a few minutes showing the cops the pile of paperwork that sits on the coffee table between us. They tell us that they need to take it with them, that they’ll make copies and return the originals to us later. I’m relieved that they’re shouldering the burden of this information, that they’ll know what to do with it. That they’ll know how best to use it to find Imogen.
I’m waiting for the police officers to get up and leave, but they remain seated. The two men exchange a look, and Troy clears his throat uncomfortably.
‘We, uh … we’d like to talk to you some more about this fight Imogen had at school.’
I look at Dylan, not understanding the sharp change in direction. He doesn’t return my look.
‘OK,’ he says, frowning. ‘What about it?’
‘Well, we’ve spoken to a few of Imogen’s fellow students today. And it seems this wasn’t the first time she’s been involved in an incident of this nature.’
‘What are you talking about?’ I ask. ‘She’s never been in trouble like that at school before. The odd detention, maybe. But for stuff like not handing in her homework. Not violence.’
I don’t want to bring up the times when Jemima has come to me, tears streaming down her face, telling me that her sister had hit her, slapped her, tripped her. Every single time, I’d spiral into panic. And every single time, Dylan would talk me down. Sibling rivalry, he’d say. It was totally normal, not a sign that Imogen was turning into her parents. I’d desperately wanted to believe him. But still, I’d watched her like a hawk.
‘The school didn’t know about the other incidents,’ Ruben explains. ‘But a number of students have repeated the same stories about alleged aggressive and violent behaviour in the past.’
‘Rumours?’ I scoff. ‘Your investigations are based on high-school rumours?’
‘Kat,’ Troy says, ‘we’re fully aware that the information we’re working with isn’t backed up by evidence. But multiple students have mentioned the same stories again and again, and we believe it’s worth following up. We haven’t been able to get the victims to talk—’
‘Victims?’ Dylan interrupts. ‘Victims? You make her sound like a tyrant! What is it she’s allegedly done?’
‘There was an incident with the contents of a child’s water bottle being laced with a laxative. And another with a young man’s finger being broken, quite deliberately, in multiple places.’
‘And you have absolutely no proof that Imogen was involved in any of this?’ Dylan asks, his tone measured.
‘Well, no, but they all said—’
‘I don’t care what anyone said,’ Dylan is standing now, his arms crossed. ‘I know my daughter, and I know she would never do anything to hurt someone else intentionally. And you wonder why we didn’t bloody tell you about Imogen’s birth parents? This is why. You’re supposed to be professionals, and here you are acting like she’s some kind of monster as soon as you found out.’
I’m glad he can muster the conviction to say the words I can’t. I think he genuinely believes it, too. Me, I’m not so certain, but, of course, I can’t say so. Not to them. Not when my daughter is missing. What kind of mother would that make me?
‘I assure you, Mr Braidwood, this has nothing to do with Imogen’s biological family.’
‘Yeah, and I was born yesterday. I think it’s time you gentlemen stopped wasting time on hearsay and started looking for my daughter.’
There’s a heavy silence as the two police officers assess Dylan. I remain seated, incapable of moving or speaking, watching the ice cubes in my water shrinking into oblivion.
‘I guess we’ll leave you alone,’ Troy says eventually.
Dylan just nods.
I can’t look them in the eye as they leave the room without another word.
They see themselves out, and when the door closes behind them, I’m hit with a blinding tiredness. My bones ache, and my head feels like it’s filled with lead. My vision blurs and the idea of talking, or moving, or thinking, makes me want to cry.
‘I’m going to lie down,’ I finally manage to murmur, and with monumental effort, I pull myself up from the sofa and walk like a woman twice my age, slowly and carefully, as though I could spontaneously shatter at any moment, to Imogen’s room. I crack open the door and peek inside.
It’s empty. Of course it’s empty. But, for just a second, I half expected to see her lying there, rolling her eyes at me, yelling at me for not knocking. I wish we could go back to that, to the time when I thought life was complicated, but it was actually so perfectly simple.
I step inside and crawl onto the bed, where I curl up and hug her pillow, breathing in the smell of her, the grown-up patchouli notes of her shampoo and the sweet perfume she loves so much, a bottle adorned with plastic flowers that her friends got her for her sixteenth birthday. I close my eyes and silently beg God to bring me my daughter. To let her come back home to her family.
To give me one more chance of being the parent she deserves, the parent I’ve desperately wante
d – and completely failed – to be.
Chapter 21
IMOGEN
She groaned again, clutching her stomach, wishing she was dead.
Dying was all she could think about now, during those brief interludes when she wasn’t trapped in endless, spiralling nightmares. She didn’t think she wanted to die, not this young, anyway. But she didn’t want to feel the way she did any more, all dizzy and detached, her mind a swampy, soupy muddle of thoughts and visions and memories. She couldn’t stand it.
She was sick, that was obvious. Maybe this was what dying felt like. Maybe it was only a matter of time before whatever it was that was devouring her from the inside took over her whole body, kicking her out and leaving nowhere for her to go but wherever it was that homeless spirits went.
Imogen tried to call out for help, but her mouth was stuck closed. She needed water, but she didn’t know how to ask, or if anyone was even there to attend to her. She thought she’d seen someone – a shadow, a vision – coming into her room, and the idea of a voice pressed at the edges of her memory, blurred and distorted, but definitely there. Had it been a hallucination? Was all of this a figment of her imagination?
The low, pulsing throb in her head gathered in intensity, and she dropped the thought. Thinking hurt almost as much as moving did, so she’d mostly given up on both. She closed her eyes and willed death to just hurry up. She had no idea how long she’d been sick for. Time didn’t move the same way as it used to. It had become elastic, sometimes stretching eternally, and other times fast-forwarding at breakneck speed. She measured time by daylight, but she hadn’t remembered to count, so she could have been in that lumpy, sweaty bed for hours or months. It didn’t seem to matter any more.
A noise cut through the fog in her brain. It took a few seconds for Imogen to understand that the door to her room had been opened. She lifted one eyelid, just a sliver, preparing for the pain that she knew the light would bring. It wasn’t as bright as she had expected; a milky glow shrouded the room, and standing in the doorway was a man. Somewhere at the back of her mind, Imogen knew she should probably scream, or at least be wary of this stranger.
Instead, she tore her dry, cracked lips apart and whispered one word: help.
Time seemed to skip again, because without warning the room was completely dark, and there was a weight on the side of the bed that was causing her body to sag. Her eyelids fluttered open and she tried to focus, but all she could make out was shapes and shadows, shifting and shrinking against the dark.
‘Shhhh, little one, it’s OK,’ a voice, low and gravelly and medicine to her soul, cut through the void.
‘Help,’ she whispered again. She knew he would. She could sense it.
‘I’ve got you. I’ve been taking care of you. Don’t worry, I won’t let anything bad happen to you.’
A hand reached under her head, warm and dry and sturdy. She nestled into it, desperate suddenly for human contact. The hand lifted, and her head tilted upwards, Imogen’s view changing from the ceiling to her feet, which swayed and swirled. Lights popped in her vision and she blinked until they disappeared.
‘Here,’ the voice said, and something warm and smooth touched her lip. Instinctively, she reached her tongue out. It made contact with liquid, salty and hot. She licked her lips, then slurped the rest of the liquid on the spoon. She didn’t know what it was. All she knew was that suddenly she was ravenous, her stomach growling, her body crying out for nutrition.
Another spoonful was lifted to her lips, and she gulped that down, and the next, and the one after that, and then they stopped. She whimpered.
‘That’s enough for now,’ the voice said.
She tried to shake her head, but he gently lowered her back onto the pillow.
‘You’ll get sick if you have too much, too quickly. I’ll be back, little one. Rest for now. I’ll take care of you. Don’t worry about anything. Just rest.’
She wanted to argue, but she was too weak for words, and her vision was getting blurry again. He had told her to rest. He had told her he would take care of her.
And so she let her eyelids fall, and sleep stole her away, a smile playing on her cracked and broken lips.
PART TWO
Chapter 22
KAT
Fifteen Years Ago
I can sense it: the hope that keeps trying to force its way to the surface like a child’s helium balloon. No matter how hard I try to press it down, stifle its enthusiasm, there it goes again, floating up, rising to the top, making me beam from ear to ear at the very idea of what is possible.
I’m late.
Only by a week, but it’s enough to erode the edges of my stoic cynicism. I should know better. I do know better. But I can’t stop the excitement from welling up and taking me with it, drifting higher and higher, high enough for the impact to destroy me, if I should fall.
I close my eyes and count slowly, taking small sips of air so that I don’t hyperventilate. The packaging said two to four minutes, but when I’ve counted to two hundred and forty I keep going until I reach three hundred. That should do it.
I’m desperate to open my eyes, to look at the stick, to see the tiny plus sign I’ve been hoping for every time I’ve done this. But I also can’t bear to know. Because if it’s the little minus symbol, the one I’m already so familiar with, I’d rather just stay in this moment of possibility for as long as I can.
In the end, though, hope wins, and I open one eye, just a sliver, to peek at the white stick balancing on the sink.
Finding out shouldn’t be this dramatic any more. I shouldn’t be emotionally invested in the result, not after all of the absences of pluses that have devastated me over the past two years. I should be resigned to it, the taking of a test just another expected disappointment, another failure, another reminder that I don’t get my dreams, when everyone around me does.
I should know better than to even do a test by now. I should know that it won’t be positive, should be so achingly aware of that fact that I don’t need a stupid white stick to taunt me with its scientific proof of my biological shortcomings. I read somewhere that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. So I suppose the only explanation for the fact that I traipsed off to the chemist today in search of this test is that I’m crazy.
Because here I am, stupid enough to let hope fool me into peeing onto that stick again. Stupid enough to let my chest swell with plans and names and the idea of finally painting the room that we’ve set aside as the nursery, the one with the firmly closed door and the thick layer of dust. The one I can’t bear to even peek inside, because the dark, unused room only serves to remind me of the unoccupied space in my own body.
It’s anger that wells up first when I see the straight little line on the end of the stick. Anger at the injustice of it, when that ditz Susie down the road got pregnant without even trying, when Melissa at work just had her fifth, when it’s all I’ve ever wanted but I’m not allowed to have it. Grief bubbles up next; a mourning for something I couldn’t lose because I never had it. And yet still it feels like a loss, the emotion stronger with each negative test.
I grip the porcelain edge of the sink for support as my body doubles over, the sobs forcing my chest and shoulders inwards, the tears leaving me breathless. I wish Dylan could be here to comfort me, but I’m also glad he’s not. I didn’t tell him I was late this month, or two months ago when the last result blindsided me, or even the time before that, five months ago now, when I thought the disappointment might actually crush me.
And the months in between, when the bleeding started right when it was supposed to, when my body betrayed me again and again, I hid my tears from him. In the end, the pressure isn’t on him to bring forth new life. He does his part, but after that there’s nothing more he can do, no input from his body while we wait for mine to perform. I can’t bear to tell him, month after month, that I’ve let us down again, that our dream is slipping
further and further from our reach. That I’ve failed, and that my body is broken.
So he doesn’t know what to do when he arrives home early from work, his hand covered in a thick white bandage – something about a nail gun and an apprentice, he explains later – and finds me sobbing uncontrollably in our en suite bathroom.
‘Kat? Kat, what’s wrong? What happened?’
He’s by my side in an instant, his strong arm around my shoulders, the smell of sweat and sawdust filling my nostrils. I’m crying too much to speak, but he spots the test, now discarded at my feet, and folds me into his chest, lifting me easily and laying me gently on our bed. We lay side by side until my gulping cries peter into whimpers and sniffs.
‘You know,’ he says, hesitantly, ‘I heard they’re not always accurate.’
I love him for trying. But he’s wrong. I know it. I know my own body, and I’m not pregnant. There have been none of the symptoms that I’ve heard go hand in hand with the early weeks: no nausea, no sensitivity to smell, no exhaustion, no sore boobs. I knew it before I took the test. I feel the same as I always have. Except now I feel worse. I feel barren.
‘I’m not pregnant,’ I say weakly. ‘I don’t think I can get pregnant.’
He squeezes my hand.
‘We’ll keep trying,’ he says, but I shake my head.
‘We’ve been trying for two years, Dyl. That’s not normal. We should have been pregnant by now; you know we should have. I just … I don’t know what to do any more. We’ve tried everything.’
And we have. I borrowed books from the library that explained how to increase our chances of conceiving. I bought a thermometer so I can measure when I’m ovulating. I haven’t had anything to drink for well over a year. I’ve taken vitamins, I’ve exercised, I’ve lain for hours with my legs pressed against the headboard of our bed. There’s only one thing left.
