How I Lost You

by Jenny Blackhurst

  “Is there nothing else?” I ask, thumbing through more pages of notes.

  “Not that I could see, but you’ll need to go through it all and see if you can find anything. Wait, we got this too.” Cassie excitedly hands me a small file with the words “Dr. Riley” penciled on the front. Inside are journalistic notes on Dr. Riley’s disappearance, interviews with friends and family, a statement from his wife, and records of his finances. All come to the same conclusion: Dr. Riley had no reason to run away, or to kill himself. He was a happy man with a good marriage, no apparent affairs they could uncover, two little girls, and no financial problems. He had been quiet the last few weeks, his wife had told the journalist, but nothing to indicate what was to come. There had been no warning.

  “I thought you were the reporter on this case?” I ask Nick, confused. “These aren’t your notes.”

  “I just wrote the article,” Nick explains. “I didn’t do the legwork on that one. I think maybe it’s time I did.” I look at him questioningly. “I think we should go and see Mrs. Riley.”

  I shake my head. “No way. I’ve dragged the past up for enough people already. The last thing Mrs. Riley needs is us turning up on her doorstep with wild conspiracies about her husband’s death.”

  “I’ve already spoken to her,” Nick surprises me by saying. “She’s more than happy to see us. She says it’s about time someone started asking more questions about her husband’s disappearance.”

  “Does she think there’s more to it than suicide?” I ask. I’d not thought about that prospect. “If he was murdered, surely we could be in some serious danger if we start poking around?”

  “I think we’re well beyond ‘poking around.’ But no, I think she’s accepted it was suicide, she just never got a good enough reason why he would kill himself.”

  “And she thinks we can provide her with that?”

  “What I think”—Cassie cuts in—“is that she’s a lonely woman and your friend Mr. Whitely here has a very good telephone manner.”

  “Is that true?” I demand, noticing the use of “your” rather than “our.” “Did you flirt an interview out of her?”

  “By any means possible,” Nick replies, his right fist over his heart and making a three-fingered salute with his left hand. “It’s the journalist’s motto.”

  “So when do we go?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  No time like the present, I guess.

  “That’s not it, Susan.” Cassie takes my arm. “There’s something else. Something big.” She looks at Nick, who can’t meet our eyes.

  “What? What is it? What’s happened?” Panic rises like bile in my throat.

  “It was him. I told him you’d be mad, I was furious when he told me, but now I see it might be for the best, even though it meant going behind your back, which is not cool.”

  “You’re worrying me now—what the hell is going on here?”

  “Cassie’s right, it was me. Do you remember the hairbrush?”

  “What hairbrush?”

  “The one that was in the box with Dylan’s blanket.”

  I almost can’t believe I’d forgotten. The small blue hairbrush that had been placed on top of my son’s blanket. I was so blindsided by the appearance of the blanket that I’d put it to one side, unconcerned with an item I’d never seen before. What use was a hairbrush to me when I’d thought my dad had been sending me vicious puzzles?

  “What did you do?” My words are slow and measured, because I’m trying to breathe. I’m struggling not to panic, because I know what he’s done. It’s what I’d have done if my mind hadn’t been so clouded over, if I hadn’t been so bloody-minded about my father.

  “Please stay calm. I took the hairbrush when I came over yesterday morning, along with one from your bathroom. I drove it to my cousin, he’s a lab manager at an independent paternity testing company, and he pulled an all-nighter to get these results for me. I picked them up this afternoon.”

  My breathing quickens and everything starts to swim. Nick’s face, Cassie’s face, both are a blur. I can feel heat rushing to my cheeks and I know I’m going to cry.

  “How could you not tell me?” I manage to whisper. Cassie is holding my hand now, instructing me to breathe slowly. Nick is apologizing but I barely hear him. I’m staring at yet another envelope that could change my entire life. This is it: if those results are negative, this is all over. If they are positive . . .

  “Listen, Susan, listen to me.” Nick is speaking slowly and calmly and I try to focus on his words. “You don’t have to open the envelope. We can just throw it in the fire and forget I ever went. But if you do want to open it, there are some things you need to know.”

  “Okay,” I hear myself say. “What do I need to know?”

  Nick looks at Cassie, who nods. “Right, firstly, the sample isn’t a great one. There were only a couple of strands of hair that had roots, rather than just being broken. Plus they’ve been contaminated just by you taking the brush out of the box. So what I’m trying to say is that this wouldn’t hold up as evidence in a court; this is just for you.”

  I hear him, but I don’t really care about what he’s saying. Whether or not the contents of this envelope would hold up in court means nothing to me; I’m not in a court and I don’t understand what contaminated evidence means. I want to open this envelope. And I really do not want to open it.

  “Suze, are you going to do it?” Cassie strokes my arm gently and I realize I’ve been sitting here in silence for a few minutes.

  It’s false hope, a nasty little voice in my head taunts me. What would Dr. Nelson say? Screw Dr. Nelson, I reply, thinking back to one of the many psychiatrists at Oakdale, a podgy, bald little hypocrite in a tweed jacket, whose hand shook with the telltale signs of alcohol dependency as he told me I needed to accept my demons. I’ve made up my mind. What kind of mother would I be if I didn’t search for the truth?

  The kind that . . . No, I won’t go there again.

  I turn to Nick. “Do you know?” I ask. “Did your friend tell you what it says? Do you already know if those hairs belong to my son?”

  Nick shakes his head. “Okay,” I say. “I’m ready.”

  Tears blur my eyes as I push my thumb under the envelope tab and rip upwards. My fingers are trembling as I pull out the piece of paper from inside and I have to squeeze my eyes closed to get rid of the tears. They spill down my cheeks silently, splashing onto the page. Slowly I unfold it and start to read.

  It takes me a minute to understand what it says—there is a lot of jargon and my eyes are working too fast to see what it all means. Then I spot it. In small black print, too small for the magnitude of what they convey, are the words “Susan Webster is not excluded from being the biological parent of the child. This result is based on a 99.999% DNA match.”

  So there it is, in black and white. My son is alive.

  33

  Over the next hour, Nick and Cassie have to stop me from calling the police or Mark fourteen or fifteen times. My head is swimming; I’m swinging between anger, joy, and devastation almost every few minutes. I can’t stop the tears from flowing down my face, running onto my T-shirt, into my hair.

  My son is alive.

  To say I’ve always known it would be a lie. Every person in any position of power who has looked at my life over the last four years has fitted it into the neat bracket of “such a shame”; not once has it ever been suggested that there might have been a mistake, that I may have been innocent. I’ve dreamt of Dylan being alive, but even in my dreams I was imagining that I’d never been left alone with him that day, or that the doctors had given me enough pills to keep me sane—not that the whole thing had been a sick lie.

  I’m not even in a place to think about who, or why. The only thing that keeps running through my head is how. How could this have happened? Is Dylan in danger?

  “How old is it?”

  Cassie’s head snaps up and I realize it’s the first time I’ve spoken in a
while. “The hair on the brush, does he know how old it is? Your friend?”

  Nick shakes his head. “Impossible to tell. All he could say is that it’s not from a three-month-old baby, it’s from a much older child.”

  “So the brush could have been used what, six months, a year ago? Anything could’ve happened to him in that time. Anything could have happened to him in the last four years when he should have been with me and I’m here drinking fucking tea!” Standing up, I hurl my half-finished mug of tea at the opposite wall and burst into tears as it smashes, splashing a milky brown stain in an arc across the paintwork. Cassie flies across the room and takes me in her arms, folding me into the soft cashmere of her sweater and holding me tight while I sob.

  “What are we going to do, Susan?” It’s the first time he’s spoken in the hour we’ve been sitting at his kitchen table. He left me to it while I cried on Cassie’s shoulder until I retched, brought us cups of coffee, and said nothing about me chain-smoking in his spare room. Now it’s past two a.m. and Cassie fell asleep on the floor of my room an hour ago, refusing even to go home to her own bed. I don’t know whether I woke Nick when I came downstairs or if he’d been awake the whole time. Wordlessly he prepared me a mug of hot chocolate and took the chair opposite me in the kitchen, looking the whole time like there was a subject he’d rather punch himself in the face than broach.

  I’m too tired to even shrug. “I’m sorry about your wall.”

  “You can repaint it another day. Stop avoiding the issue. We need to decide what to do about what’s just happened.”

  “About Mark?”

  He nods. It feels like a lifetime ago that I pulled up at my old home, when I still thought Dylan was dead, when I still thought I had killed him.

  “It all seems so different now,” I say. “He couldn’t get me in the house fast enough—I thought he was afraid one of the neighbors might see me on the doorstep, but now I wonder if he was worried about someone else seeing me.”

  Nick doesn’t stop watching me as I speak. He looks shattered; his eyes are puffier than usual and the skin underneath is dark and lined. “Do you think he knows?” he asks eventually. “Do you think Mark knows that you didn’t kill Dylan? What do you think he’s capable of, Susan?” His voice is intense; he’s leaning towards me slightly and his hand is gripping his mug harder than it was before. What does he want me to say?

  “It seems impossible.” I’ve thought of nothing since. “He was so convincing when he made his speech about finding Dylan—but he couldn’t have, could he? Not if Dylan’s still alive.”

  Nick doesn’t remind me how shaky the DNA evidence is, how it’s still possible the sample has been contaminated. And I don’t mention it because I know my son is alive and I am innocent.

  “Unless he was wrong about him not breathing,” he offers instead. “It was a massively stressful situation; he might have believed Dylan was dead when he found him. I mean, he thought you were. What if something happened after you both went to the hospital?”

  I consider this for a minute. “You mean like someone stole him and let us both believe he had died?” I’d much rather believe that than think for another second that Mark was involved in this. “It seems crazy, but doesn’t this all?”

  “You still haven’t answered my question, Susan. Do you think your husband was lying to you? What do you know about his past? His family?”

  Everything, I’d thought. Until I found the pictures of him with the mystery woman, I’d thought I’d known everything there was to know about Mark Webster. Does the fact that I didn’t know about a university girlfriend change that?

  I sigh. “I can’t think about this anymore. I just need to speak to him, to ask him . . .” Despite everything, I still want Mark to hold me and tell me we’ll get through this together.

  “That’s not a good idea,” Nick says firmly. Is there a note of urgency in his words? “For all you know, he sent those photos to us today—it could be him having you followed in the first place. If you call the police they might—”

  “They might think I’ve gone crazy again. I’ll be committed.”

  “I think we should still go and see Mrs. Riley tomorrow; after all, her husband is the one who pronounced Dylan dead and who went missing four months later. But now we need rest.”

  I don’t think I can even consider sleep tonight, but as I lie down on my bed, Cassie still flat out on the floor at my feet, my eyes begin to droop. I can’t remember what I was thinking about just a few minutes ago, so I know I’m falling asleep. Through the silence I hear a voice, as clear as if the woman speaking was standing next to me: “I came to help you.”

  In my mind I picture myself lunging forward, pushing something, someone. I’m defending myself, thrusting someone away, away from me and my baby. Hands reach out for me; I stumble backwards and scream. My mind switches view and I’m in the audience of a play. When I look at the person next to me, they’re wearing a bike helmet and clutching a camera. I look to my right; there they are again, and again in front. The whole theater is full of faceless people taking my picture, and I wonder if I’ll ever be free of them.

  34

  JACK: 1 DECEMBER 1992

  Three days since the body had been found and the police were still everywhere. The girls were getting annoyingly paranoid. On the first night after Beth went missing it had been fun, no one wanted to stop their lives ticking on. But they were careful, scared. The girls wanted someone to walk them home, see them to their rooms; they’d been so grateful to be in the company of someone safe. Now, though, now that the reality had kicked in, they were too terrified to go anywhere. Everyone was a suspect—well, apart from people like him.

  The rumors were the best part. He’d heard it all: Beth had been sleeping with everyone from university lecturers to punters who had been paying her for sex. No one suspected the reality. He had a good idea that he could have gone to the police and told them exactly what had happened to Bethany Connors and they’d have laughed him out of the station.

  Shakes had gone to pieces when he was told about the discovery of Beth’s body. Jack hadn’t been with him at the time—it was unlikely they’d kiss and make up just yet—but he’d watched from across the room as his face turned an ashen gray color, seen tiny beads of sweat form on his forehead. Matt had had to hold him up—incredible really, considering how much he’d been shaking too. Now Billy had run back to Daddy’s house, pathetic. Richard was a powerful man these days, but even he couldn’t bring murdered fiancées back from the dead.

  Jack had to speak to Billy, make sure he wasn’t going to be running to the police. Bad things happened all the time; he had to make sure Shakes knew this was nothing to get himself in a mess over. He would get over Beth, as he had got over Tanya; they’d find him a new piece and he’d be happy as a pig in shit again. This didn’t have to be the end of everything.

  35

  Mrs. Riley lives just outside Bradford in a stunning modern house with the kind of views that inspire poetry. The house doesn’t stand alone; there are enough neighbors to make me nervous about our visit, even though I’m sure they’re not psychic. I’m still waiting for someone to emerge from the bushes. The feeling of being followed has amplified since being at Nick’s house, since my dream last night, and our new information. Now that I know about my son, I can feel determination radiating from me—I wonder if the person trying to scare me off can sense the change? Did they wake up this morning knowing that my first thought was that I am going to find them? That I am coming for my son?

  Dr. Riley had clearly earned a decent crust, or maybe they had inherited money. I’m pretty sure even a generous doctor’s salary wouldn’t stretch to such a beauty spot and the Range Rover that sits on the drive. I have no idea what Mrs. Riley does for a living, of course. I could be selling the poor woman short—for all I know she could be a surgeon or a lawyer. One thing I do know is that I’m glad Cassie decided to go back home this morning. She would have hated this place.


  “Nice house,” Nick comments under his breath. “Wonder where they got their hands on this much cash?”

  Always the investigative journalist, and now I’m thinking like him. Fighting the urge to take his hand as we walk towards the front door, and scared of what we might find, I widen the distance between us just in case I automatically reach out and completely humiliate myself. I have to remind myself I have someone who believes in me enough to be here.

  “Are you ready?” Nick asks. I nod in reply, hoping I won’t be doing much of the talking. Before he has a chance to knock, the front door opens, surprising us both.

  “Sorry,” Mrs. Riley apologizes immediately, seeing the startled look on both our faces, but it isn’t the door opening that has surprised me, it is the person standing behind it.

  Mrs. Riley looks like nothing short of a movie star. The words “doctor’s wife” and “deserted wife” conjure up visions of a poor, elderly woman, not the stunning young Real Housewives extra who has opened the door to us. Silently I berate myself for failing to remember how old Dr. Riley actually was—midthirties according to the article—for being stupid enough not to realize that a frail, elderly woman probably wouldn’t be driving a Range Rover, and for not bothering to remove last night’s makeup and reapply, preferring to just paste a fresh batch over it.

  Following Mrs. Riley inside, I quickly pull my fingers through my hair, hoping to tame it slightly, and run a finger under each eye to combat any eyeliner smudges. It never seemed to matter to Mark that I wasn’t the most polished woman he’d ever met. The image of the beautiful redhead with her arms wrapped around my ex-husband dances in my head. She didn’t look like someone who had to work at beauty. Such a contrast to the slightly chubby woman with the hair that wages war against brushes and straighteners that he ended up marrying. Was the contrast deliberate? Did he choose me because I didn’t remind him of his former lover in any way? Did he take my son away to be with her?