The Moment She Left

by Susan Lewis

  He could certainly be forgiven for thinking that, since she’d taken care to hide how she was really feeling, not wanting to hurt him, or their children, or the rest of their family. How she really felt was that she still loved him, and probably always would, but she was no longer in love with him.

  She realised now that she hadn’t been even when she’d agreed to marry him, three years ago, which was an awful irony – was that the right word, maybe mistake would be better – when they’d been together for over two decades by then and had felt no need to be married before. Actually it wasn’t a full two decades, because he’d left her for a while. After seventeen and a half years of living under the same roof and bringing up their children together he’d suddenly announced one day that he’d had enough. He didn’t want to be a house husband and stay-at-home dad any longer while she went about playing detective – that was how he’d put it – at all hours of the day and night. Apparently she was to ignore the fact that he’d managed to build a very successful Internet security business during the hours the kids were at school, and evenings when she was there to take care of them. For whatever reason he’d suddenly decided he needed to break loose of the home and travel the world, alone.

  She harboured no resentment towards him for the desertion now; however, at the time, with her police career on an upward trajectory, and two young teenagers to cope with, she’d been devastated, furious, even murderous. She’d hated him, had sworn she’d never take him back, while all the time she’d longed for him to come.

  He had, eventually, putting his aberration, as he’d called it, down to a midlife crisis that he was finally, happily, over. Wasn’t that great? Actually, in a way it was, because life had moved on quite a bit during his two-year absence and punishing him was no longer a priority for her. They’d grown in ways neither of them would have been able to if they’d stayed together – he’d sold his Internet business and made a fortune, while she’d left the Metropolitan police to take up a promotion to Detective Sergeant with the Dean Valley force. What really mattered, she’d decided then, was the history they shared, the love that was still there, albeit altered, and most of all the children, Luke and Alayna, who were desperate for their parents to get back together.

  ‘I never stopped loving you,’ he’d told her on his return. ‘You’re the only woman I’ve ever loved, that I’ve ever even slept with, apart from Brigitte, and all that did was make me realise just how wrong my life was without you.’

  Brigitte. He’d found someone else during the time they were apart, but she could hardly hold that against him when, eventually, she had too.

  Maybe, if his beloved father hadn’t just died (which in truth was what had brought him back from his travels), she’d have found a way to suggest that they just be friends. However, they’d all been deeply affected by Dougie’s death, and at times like that it was normal, even necessary, for families to pull together. So, she’d asked him if he’d be prepared to stay in Kesterly-on-Sea, where she and the children had settled while he was away exploring the world.

  He’d had it all worked out. He was definitely staying. His mother, like hers, lived in Kesterly, his father’s property business was headquartered in the town and it was his intention, and his father’s wish, that he should take it over. While she, if she was serious about giving up the police force, could do whatever she pleased. Work with him, study for a new career, she might even want to be a stay-at-home mum for a while.

  The options were endless when money wasn’t a problem, and the heady sums he’d made from the sale of his business, plus what he’d just inherited, had meant that the world truly was their oyster.

  So she’d done what everyone wanted and married him while knowing, even as they were taking their vows, that she was making a mistake. It might be right for their mothers, the children, and presumably for him, it just wasn’t right for her.

  It had taken three years for her to decide she must stop living a lie. In spite of how many hearts it would break, she had to be true to herself, even if it was hurting her too.

  ‘Are you in love with him?’ he asked now, but not for the first time.

  She looked away. ‘I’ve already told you,’ she answered, ‘he has nothing to do with this.’

  It was true; her reason for leaving had nothing to do with Graeme Ogilvie, the man she’d had a brief relationship with during the time she and Martin were apart. She wished now that she’d never mentioned him, and knew she wouldn’t have, had Martin not kept on and on insisting she must have met someone.

  Looking at Martin now was hard. His face was pinched, his dark eyes wide and hostile; fighting rejection never made a person attractive at a time when they most needed to be. ‘Is he in love with you?’ he demanded sourly.

  With a flash of irritation, she said, ‘How many times do I have to tell you it isn’t about him?’

  ‘Why don’t you just answer the question? Is he in love with you?’

  ‘Of course not. I’ve had next to no contact with him since we broke up three years ago . . .’

  ‘But you’re in touch with him now?’

  She didn’t argue, there was no point when he wasn’t listening.

  She wanted him to go, to leave her alone with her conscience so she could start deciding how best to handle it, and her children – and the rest of her life.

  ‘If you leave, Mum, I’ll never, ever speak to you again,’ eighteen-year-old Alayna had ranted furiously down the phone when she’d found out about the break-up, thanks to her father calling her at uni to deliver the happy news.

  Andee had wanted to wait until Alayna and her older brother were back for the summer before telling them, but it was too late for that now.

  ‘Mum, you can’t be serious,’ Luke had protested when he’d rung from Exeter, where he was in his third year of Sport and Exercise Science. ‘You need to think about this, because it sounds to me like you’re doing what Dad did all those years ago, having a middle-aged meltdown.’

  ‘I’m not in crisis,’ she’d told him, although maybe quietly, underneath it all, she was. ‘I just need to be on my own for a while. I’m renting a flat in Kesterly, so I’ll see you every day when you’re home, if you want to, but I know how busy you always are.’

  ‘Every day could be overdoing it,’ he agreed, ‘but I just don’t get why you have to hurt Dad like this. I know what he did when he left was terrible, but I thought you were over it. I mean you married him, didn’t you?’

  ‘I did, and I’m completely over what happened. This is something different. Something I have to do for me.’

  She’d never told the children about Graeme Ogilvie, it had been too new a relationship at the time for her to share it with them, but as soon as she’d admitted it to Martin he’d clearly decided their children needed to know too.

  In truth, she’d only run into Graeme a few times during the three years since she’d broken up with him. On the first two they’d been at the same function in town, and though they’d spoken, naturally, neither of them had referred to their past relationship. They hadn’t mentioned it on the third occasion either, which was just last week when she’d gone to his antique shop, not to see him, but someone who worked there.

  That was a whole other story, and perhaps one of the stranger ways in which fate had chosen to play its hand, at least for her and Graeme in throwing them together again. For Blake Leonard, the person she’d gone to see . . . God only knew what fate was trying to do to him.

  Fixing her eyes on Martin now, she said, ‘I don’t want you to tell the children any more about Graeme. I only told you I went to his shop because I wanted to be honest with you, but the reason for my visit had nothing to do with him.’

  ‘Oh, just shopping for a few antiques, were you? Something you do all the time.’

  Ignoring the sarcasm, she said, ‘You’re making this far more difficult than it needs to be.’

  ‘Please excuse me for minding about you leaving me. Does he know? Have you told him you�
��ve rented your own place?’

  ‘Of course not. It’s nothing to do with him and for all I know he’s met somebody else by now, so he wouldn’t even be interested in where I’m living.’ It wouldn’t surprise her at all if Graeme had someone else. He was a good-looking man with a wickedly dry sense of humour, a love of the arts, most things Italian and – this would interest other women far more than it did her – he was pretty well off. A real catch, was how most would describe him.

  Martin was that, too.

  He started to speak, cleared his throat and ran a hand over his unshaven chin. ‘So when do I next get to see you?’ he asked gruffly.

  She didn’t know what to say to that. Anything would be wrong.

  ‘You don’t have to answer now,’ he said, reaching for his keys. ‘Call me when you’ve decided to stop behaving like a bitch.’

  As the front door closed behind him, she turned back to the window and watched as he emerged into the street below and crossed to the van he’d hired to help move her in.

  She was touched that he’d helped her, how could she not be when he was acting against his own interests?

  He was kind; she’d always known that about him, it was a large part of why she cared for him so much – of why she loved him. She just didn’t want to carry on pretending there was more in her heart than friendship. Perversely, she didn’t want to lose him either, though she had to accept that she might, at least for a while.

  As he pulled out into the slow-moving traffic she wondered where he would go after dropping the van and picking up his car. To his mother’s, or to hers? Either would offer him a sympathetic ear, although, to be fair, both mothers had been understanding and patient with her too, which couldn’t have been easy when they treasured how close they were as a family. So close that until today Andee and Martin had been living at her mother’s in a craggy little hamlet up on the northern headland known as Bourne Hollow.

  They should have moved into a place of their own long ago; perhaps this was another indication of how uncommitted she had felt to their future, that she had never been able to find the right house.

  Martin was due to move over to his own mother’s in the leafy suburb of Westleigh sometime in the next few days, where the children would join him for alternate weeks throughout the summer. They still had their own rooms in both grandmothers’ homes, and no matter where life took them once they’d finished uni, Andee couldn’t imagine that ever changing.

  There was an extra bedroom here in the flat, and Andee was hoping that they might at the very least crash with her after a late night out in town.

  Alayna was clearly still furious with her. She wasn’t returning texts, or calling back after Andee left messages.

  Andee would deal with that when the time came. For now she had a lot of unpacking to do, emails to send and a call to make to Helen Hall, the lawyer who’d asked her to try and help Blake Leonard, whose teenage daughter had disappeared without trace two years ago.

  Andee remembered the case well, it had been all over the news at the time; that kind of story always resonated deeply with her.

  When she’d first received Helen’s call asking her to help, her immediate reaction had been to refuse. Trying to find missing children – and to her nineteen still qualified as a child – was one of the main reasons she’d ended up leaving the force. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to help these families, she longed to do so, knowing only too well what they were going through, but the emotional strain on her had become too great. She was no longer the right person to judge how best to handle panicked, shocked, terrified and even in some cases guilty parents, when she could never put her own parents out of her mind, and how it had been for them when her sister, Penny, aged fourteen, had disappeared from their lives.

  If Penny had eventually come home Andee would almost certainly have put it all behind her by now. She might not even have joined the police force in the first place. As it was, no body, no trace of her at all, had ever been found. They’d received a letter though, sent around two weeks after she’d vanished, and the words were seared so deeply and painfully into Andee’s heart that she knew she’d never forget them.

  Dear Mum and Dad, I probably ought to say sorry for leaving the way I have, but maybe you already don’t mind very much that I’m not around any more, so instead I’ll say sorry for always being such a disappointment to you. I know Dad wanted a son when I was born, so I guess I’ve been a let-down to him from the start, and I don’t blame him for always loving Andee the most because she’s much nicer-looking than I am and likes sports, the same as him, and is really clever so it stands to reason that he’d be really proud of her. I know I shouldn’t say this, but sometimes I hate her for being so much better than I am at everything. No one ever seems to notice me when she’s in the room. It’s like I become invisible and I know she wishes I would go away. So that’s what I’m going to do.

  I don’t know what else to say, except sorry again. I expect you’ll all be much happier without me. Please tell Andee she can have whatever she likes of mine, although I don’t expect she’ll want anything at all.

  Your daughter, Penny

  To this day they still didn’t know whether Penny had committed suicide after sending the note, or if she’d gone off somewhere to make a new life. At fourteen it had seemed unlikely she’d make a new life, how would she, unless there had been someone to help her? No evidence had ever come to light of her being involved with someone who might have enticed her away. And surely, after seeing the news and realising how much they were all suffering, she’d have come back. With their father being a chief superintendent with the Met every imaginable effort had been poured into finding his daughter, and it hadn’t stopped there because Andee herself had revisited the case several times over the years, but there was never anything new to be uncovered.

  Almost as heartbreaking as losing Penny was their father dying without ever knowing what had happened to her.

  It was like that for some families, Andee knew that better than most, not only because hers was one of them, but because of how many others she had watched suffering, while she, unable to give them the answers, or even the body, they needed, had felt every part of their helplessness and pain.

  She hoped to God that Blake Leonard’s family wasn’t going to end up amongst those she’d been unable to help. No one, but no one, deserved to go through such interminable hell. However, two years was a long time in a missing person case, and going by the police files she’d so far been given access to, the search appeared to have been thorough and extensive. So she had to concede that the chances of finding Jessica really weren’t good. Not that she was prepared to rule it out, miracles did happen, as the news occasionally showed, and who was to say that one wasn’t waiting to happen here?

  Chapter Two

  ‘Daddy, you are totally amazing. I had no idea you could do that.’

  Blake Leonard’s hazel eyes sparkled with mischief. ‘You’d be surprised at what I can do, young lady,’ he teased, as she checked that the drawing really was exactly the same no matter which way up she turned it.

  ‘Because you’re magic,’ she cried, and laughing delightedly she threw her skinny arms around him.

  ‘Ask him if he can magic you off to your dance class,’ Jenny called out from the kitchen.

  Jessica’s eight-year-old eyes grew round. ‘Shall we fly there, Dad?’ she whispered.

  ‘Good idea,’ he whispered back. ‘I’ll go and get my wings.’

  The joy, the comfort of the unexpected memory abruptly vanished as Blake’s attention was snatched back to the present, where he was kneeling in front of a planter carefully tugging dead blooms from a fuchsia.

  ‘So have you heard any more from the detective woman?’ Matt asked, coming to stand at the back door of their terraced home on the edge of Kesterly old town. He was a tall young man with a lot of dark stubble hiding the delicate set of his jaw, long, spiked lashes around his deep navy eyes and an attitude that co
uld switch from belligerent to vulnerable to frightened in the blink of an eye.

  Before answering Blake glanced through the open French doors to the dining room where the whitewashed walls were cluttered with some of the many paintings he’d done over the years, and the table was strewn with a number of books he was consulting for his work at Ogilvie’s. Remembering that his wife had gone to stay with her parents, he felt a jolt of sadness, though it left him free to speak – it was rarely a good idea to talk about Jessica, or anything concerning her, in front of Jenny.

  ‘She’s an ex-detective,’ he reminded Matt, ‘and I’m seeing her tomorrow.’ His once lively, handsome face, always claimed by Jenny to be too cheerful for an artist, had become creased and dulled by the blows life had dealt him, most particularly the disappearance of his daughter.

  Matt sank his gangly frame into one of the canvas chairs in front of a rusting wrought-iron table. ‘Is she coming here?’ he enquired.

  Blake wondered if Matt wanted to meet Andee Lawrence. Since the police had scaled back their search for Jessica they’d felt abandoned and helpless, frustrated to a point of madness, but then a friend of Matt’s had said they should try talking to his mother who was Helen Hall, one of the town’s more prominent lawyers. So Blake had called, and Helen Hall had put him on to ex-Detective Sergeant Andee Lawrence. ‘I asked her to come to the shop again,’ he told Matt. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to invite Andee to their home, he simply didn’t want any of the neighbours recognising her and asking questions. They’d been subjected to enough attention at the time Jessica had vanished.

  ‘So did she say if she’d found anything new yet?’ Matt asked.

  Blake shook his head, his heart aching with the torment they shared, the anguish and confusion that never went away. ‘She’s had no time, and anyway I don’t think she would on the phone.’

  It was so much easier to cope on the good days, and they happened from time to time. On the bad days it was so awful he felt like ending it all rather than carry on with the not knowing, the self-loathing and blame he heaped upon himself for what he’d done to his family. If he hadn’t been forced to bring them here, Jessica and Matt would have taken their gap year and probably been thousands of miles from London on that fateful day. Jessica would never have known the person or persons who’d taken her, would even now be hanging out with her family here, or off somewhere with friends, maybe rehearsing for a gig, or writing new material with Matt.