by Adele Parks
“The police have checked out Toma’s alibi and since the funds he has in his account are a certified gift from me, there is no case against him.” Who is Mum talking about? Who is Toma? I sit at the top of the stairs that lead straight into the kitchen. My parents have their backs to me, so they don’t know I’m listening.
It’s a funny thing. We now live in a massive house but honestly, because it’s all open plan, there are no secrets. Or rather, there are loads of secrets, apparently, but it’s easier to find them out now than when we lived in our small house when everyone had a door they could close. I’m guessing Dad didn’t take that into account when he picked this place.
“So, what now?”
“They said they had someone else in for questioning.”
“Who?”
“Patrick Pearson.”
“Patrick Pearson?” Dad sounds stunned.
“Yes. They haven’t arrested him, but I think it’s only a matter of time.” Mum sounds satisfied with this, vindicated.
“Shit.” Dad takes a step backward, staggers a bit, rests his hands on the kitchen counter, as though he needs something to keep him upright.
Mum snakes her arms around his back and rubs him, like she’s comforting a child. “I know, this is huge, isn’t it? DI Owens said there is a paper trail to enormous sums of money in various offshore accounts that can ultimately be linked back to our account. Well, a digital trail, I suppose.”
“How much money?”
“He didn’t say.”
“And you didn’t give him the money? It’s not another one of your gifts, is it?”
“Ha-ha, Jake,” Mum says drily. “I’m serious. No, of course I didn’t give him any bloody money. I hate the man.”
Dad nods but doesn’t look at her. Mum is staring at him, trying to make eye contact, trying to read him. She used to be very good at that. She used to say she knew his every thought, then she’d joke that it wasn’t tricky as all he ever thought about was food or sport. I think he has a lot more on his mind nowadays.
“Must be hard for you to process the betrayal. It’s a massive shock,” she says.
“No, it’s not that. Well, yes, yes, obviously. But—” My dad shakes his head. He seems bewildered.
“I mean, it’s also a relief, right? Now that we’ve found out who did it, the kids are safer.” Mum sounds shrill. I can see her face side-on. She looks hard, furious. Then her face sort of collapses and she starts to cry. This is her thing. She behaves aggressive and tough just before the moment she shows her vulnerability. I think she needs to take some evening primrose or something. “I am devastated, too,” she admits. “I’ve known for months that Patrick is a vile, despicable criminal, but I never imagined he’d hurt our daughter, a child he has known since she was born. I suppose that’s self-absorbed of me. After all, he killed Toma’s child through greed and neglect, so actually planning an abduction isn’t such a jump.” WTF? Patrick killed someone? A child? Mum goes on. “The man disgusts me. You saw her, Jake. You saw the state she was in.”
“I know, I know.” Dad looks like he’s going to cry again. He’s been like an emotional wreck since I was kidnapped. They both have, but Mum tries harder to tough it out, it’s like she doesn’t want to worry me. Dad’s eyes follow me around, scarred, scared, sorrowful. I wish he wouldn’t. It’s hard enough dealing with my own crap. Dad turns to Mum and pulls her to his chest. She sort of collapses against him. I shiver. I mean, I’m home now, right? Safe. But yeah, Mum is correct—I was in a state. Totally fucked up. It was so, so beyond awful. I rub my stomach. I feel empty. Since, you know. I wasn’t even sure I wanted it. I probably didn’t. So why am I so sad? It’s a relief, right? That I didn’t have to make a decision. The doctor said I’d still be okay, you know, in the future, when I’m older and I’m with someone. So that’s good. Only it doesn’t really feel good. Not totally. I feel so, so sad. I try not to think about it too much. Probably for the best. But even though I’m not trying to remember stuff, bits keep coming back to me. Like nothing in a coherent run but flashes of sounds or smells. The memories choke me, deafen me. Like I can still feel the gag in my mouth, tearing at the side of my lips, the actual texture of the cloth, and I keep wanting to spit it out. And the smell of the damp, fuggy mattress lingers in my nostrils, makes me feel sick and faint. The perfume the woman wore hangs about near my hair. I mean, that’s not possible. Perfume doesn’t transfer from one person to another and even if it did, I’ve washed my hair, like, five times since then. But the smell won’t go away.
“I’m going to go and visit Megan,” I yell as I clatter down the stairs.
“What? No. Why would you do that?” asks Mum, breaking from Dad’s embrace and turning to me, the habitual look of perpetual worry etched into her face.
“I’ve just heard you say Patrick has been arrested.”
“Well, taken in for questioning,” Mum corrects cautiously. She doesn’t yell at me for listening in to their conversation or anything like that. Since my abduction, and the baby thing, Mum and Dad have started to treat me differently. Differently from before and differently to each other. Mum and I are closer. She seems to, I don’t know, almost respect me as another adult now. Dad seems embarrassed if anything. I guess there’s no way either of them can see me as their baby girl anymore.
“Can you imagine what she is going through? Her dad is like a proper crim.”
My dad, who is basically a hero—negotiated my release, recovered me, got me to hospital—steps up again and says to Mum, “I’ll drive her, she shouldn’t go on her own. You stay here with Logan. We won’t be long.”
Mum, who was probably going to have, like, a million objections and probably also wants to come with us—not to offer Carla any consolation, just to punch her in the face or something—looks torn. “Mum, we were best friends for forever,” I add.
“You can’t leave Logan here alone,” points out Dad.
Mum is pretty stressed about our security at the moment, understandably. Even if Patrick is behind bars and if he was responsible for kidnapping me, he’s hardly the only greedy nutter on the planet. There’s no way she’ll leave Logan alone. Mum nods stiffly.
CHAPTER 49
Emily
We drive to the Pearsons’ house in silence. Dad keeps his eyes on the road, he looks tense, stressed. Everyone does, all the time now. We haven’t spent much time alone together since he found me in that barn. Any time, really. If I walk into a room and it’s just him, he makes some excuse to leave, says he’s looking for a book to read or has an errand to run. He is obviously uncomfortable around me. I get it. I’m not exactly cool with him, either.
It’s the pregnancy thing.
Dad hasn’t talked to me about it. Not mentioned it once. I get it. He saw my baby bleed out all over my leotard, and he can’t hide from the fact his princess had sex. I swallow hard, chew on the inside of my cheek as though I am eating gum. It stops me crying. I don’t know if Dad is angry that I had sex, per se. I mean, under normal circumstances he’d be furious, clear-cut furious. But it’s so complicated. Maybe he’s not angry as such, just sad about how it all turned out. I don’t know. Mum says he feels bad, like really, really bad. Daddies are supposed to protect their little girls, right? She says she feels really bad, too. She cried when she told me this. “We’re so sorry we didn’t keep you safer, that we didn’t protect you.” She’s said this over and over again. It’s not like it’s their fault. They didn’t hit me and bundle me into a van. I think it’s a good thing I’m not going to be a parent yet. I really couldn’t cope with the constant guilt and self-blame that obviously comes with it.
I can’t stand the silence, so I ask Dad, “Do you think he did it?”
“The police obviously do.”
“Why would he, though? Why would he do that to me?” Patrick isn’t, like, a great dad to Megan and her brothers, the way my dad is a gr
eat dad to me and Logan. He doesn’t make jokes or hot chocolates when she has friends for a sleepover. He doesn’t get up on a Saturday morning and suggest something fun like Go Ape or a trip to London to do some shopping, and he doesn’t really sit and talk to her much. My dad does all of this stuff (well, the talking bit is on a temporary pause, but usually!). Patrick was often absent. He left for work before Megan got up, he arrived home late, loosened his tie and asked Carla for a drink in a way that always made any kids that happened to be about—his own or guests—feel we should go into another room, that we were in the way. It seemed he put his work ahead of his family. I know Megan has always thought my dad is better than hers, but Patrick wasn’t, like, the worst, either. He bought her cool stuff, he helped her with her maths homework. He wasn’t, like, a totally crap dad. Or at least not until now. Kidnapping, false imprisonment, extortion is totally crap. New level crap.
I think Dad has hay fever because his eyes are red and watery. He can’t be actually crying, can he? Why now? I get crying in the hospital, when I was all battered and stuff, but why now when the police have basically solved it, caught the bad guy? He still doesn’t look at me, but he does answer my question. “Well, he missed out on a lot of money, a lot, and I think that might have sent him a bit nuts. People do a lot of really bad stuff for the sort of money we won. Really bad stuff.”
I suddenly get nervous when we pull up at Megan’s. I could be mistaken. What if my hunch is wrong and she thinks I’m mental, or what if I’m right and she just doesn’t want to talk about it?
And if I’m right? What if Megan was there with her dad and she was the one who gave me that water, who helped me? Because honestly, at that moment it was so dark that I think her kindness saved me. And I don’t mean dark so I couldn’t see. I mean it was dark in my head and heart. I thought I was going to die. I thought they were going to kill me. I was lying in my own piss and blood. Never more alone or scared in my life.
I remember hearing a car pull up. Voices. Probably she was told to stay in the car. Probably she didn’t know what was going on, but Megan rarely does as she’s told. She’s too nosy to stay in a car when clearly something big was happening. I can just imagine her sneaking out of the car and into the barn wondering who her dad was meeting. She must have been shit scared when she found me. Was she the person who contacted my dad? They haven’t told me all the details about how Dad found me. They said they will but only when I’m ready. I do know that he got a tip-off and acted on it. Didn’t even call the police, just charged in, unconcerned for his own safety, just desperate to get me home. Sadly, the intel on where I was being kept came after he’d paid the cash, but someone sent him a pin drop of where to find me. Someone was trying to help. To save me. Megan loves pin drops. She used to always send me them if we were going somewhere new. I’ve never known anyone who loves a pin drop as much as she does. Who knows what might have happened if she hadn’t done that? Once Patrick had the money secured in his offshore account, might he have instructed those men to kill me? I don’t know, it’s possible. But as Dad arrived, he scared them off. Megan saved my life.
Carla answers the door. She doesn’t seem surprised to see us. She pulls my dad into this big over-the-top hug, like, hangs on his neck and then she starts to cry. I am getting a bit bored of everyone crying all the time. I just stand there. After about a year she seems to remember I’m there and says, “Megan is in her room.” Pretty rude, not even a polite inquiry into my health. On the other hand, everyone is treating me so carefully, it’s almost a relief to be treated normally. I don’t wait to be asked twice. I bound up the stairs.
On Megan’s bedroom door there is a tin sign, it says: “Megan’s messy room. Enter at your own risk.” I have one that says the same, but “Emily’s messy room” obviously. We bought them at Camden Market when we were about ten. We’d come to London because the three mums wanted to take all of us to the Tower of London to see the Crown Jewels. The crowns were flashy, but the best bit of the trip was the market. Ridley sulked that you couldn’t buy the room sign with his name on it. We teased him and said he wasn’t in our club. I don’t know where my sign is anymore; at the back of some wardrobe until we moved, I’d guess, maybe in the loft now, or a bag that ended up at a charity shop. I’ve always thought it was funny that Megan kept her sign up. In so many ways she’s so cool and conscious of being seen as adult but then she’ll just do something funny like keep up a sign that basically advertises her kid status. Megan can do that. She can make something uncool, cool, just by her disregard for caring whether it’s cool or not.
I’ve missed her.
The last time we saw each other she was punching me in a loo. Or was she feeding me water and chocolate?
I’m still gathering my nerve to knock on the door, or maybe just open it and go in without announcing myself, when Carla shouts up the stairs. “Your dad is just going to run me to the shops. With everything that’s been going on, we have nothing in for supper. He says you are staying.”
Megan obviously hears her mother and she flings open the door. I try to pretend I’ve just walked up the stairs and not admit that I’ve been hanging about, gathering courage to go into her room. She stares at me but doesn’t say anything. It doesn’t seem like she’s going to answer her mum, so I yell down the stairs, “Okay.”
“Keep an eye on your brothers, Megan. Text your mum and tell her you are staying for a bit, Emily.”
I guess Dad knows Mum will be less than chuffed with this news, which is why he’s letting me deliver it. Cheers, Dad. I decide I’ll text in a bit, put it off for a while. Megan and I stay on the landing until we hear our parents leave the house, the door bang behind them and the roar of my dad’s Ferrari down the street.
“She’s been dying to get in that car,” comments Megan, rolling her eyes. “I promise you there is food in the house—she’s just looking for an excuse for your dad to take her somewhere in the Ferrari. She is so shallow.”
“Total puddle,” I add. Megan grins and then grabs me, folding me into a tight hug.
“It is a fucking cool car, though, hey?” she asks.
“Totally,” I murmur into her neck. I inhale her and I’m not mistaken. Of course I’m not. Her smell is as familiar to me as my own.
CHAPTER 50
Lexi
Logan and I play FIFA. He is Manchester City and I am Real Madrid. He wins all three games. I get a text from Emily saying she is staying at Megan’s for supper. I’m conflicted. Emily needs all the friends she can have around her right now, but how can Megan be a friend when her father is responsible for the kidnapping? It’s a lot to process. I decide to let it go. Emily needs her space. Logan and I order a pizza delivery. He thinks he’s died and gone to heaven. I grin at my son, glad I can make him so happy so easily. I don’t hear from Jake. I guess he could be eating with them, or maybe he’s gone to the gym. Or maybe somewhere else. Jennifer’s.
The thought keeps creeping up on me. I wish it didn’t, but I can’t quite shake the fact that for years I thought I knew where he was, what he was doing. I didn’t. Logan gets bored of beating me so easily and says he’s going to play with his friends online now. I’ve enjoyed our mother-son time, but honestly, I hate video games and am relieved. I go downstairs into the kitchen and pour myself a glass of wine.
I am not planning on snooping. I’m planning on picking up a book and losing myself in someone else’s world, but I find myself in the room that Jake designated as his office. I flick on his PC. A subconscious part of my brain has taken over and my body is just following instructions. Whilst the PC is warming up, humming into life, I open his desk drawers. I idly flick through his paperwork. I don’t know exactly what I’m looking for—emails or cards from her, phone records that prove they are still talking to one another. I wonder if he’s changed his password. It used to be our wedding anniversary.
CHAPTER 51
Emily
M
egan keeps her room really tidy. She always has. Ridley and I used to tease her and say she had OCD, but my mum said we weren’t allowed to do that because mental disorders weren’t a laughing matter and just because a teenager keeps her room tidy, it doesn’t mean she has a syndrome. My mum can be really worthy. Megan sits on the stool in front of the dressing table and I sit on her neat bed that could have been made by a soldier and I wish there was some clutter lying about, something for me to pick up and play with, something to distract us both.
“Do you want to listen to some music?” she asks. I nod. She puts on Billie Eilish’s latest release. I downloaded this recently, too. It cheers me that we have continued to listen to the same music, even when our lives were spiraling in different directions. It means something about us, our friendship. “How’ve you been?” she asks eventually.
I shrug. Where to start? Rich? Euphoric? Lonely? Terrified?
I go with, “Pregnant.”
“For real?” Her eyes are saucers. I almost want to giggle. It’s always felt pretty fun shocking Megan because, out of the two of us, she’s probably the most daring.
It’s no fun, though, when I have to add, “I was. I lost it, during the abduction.” She nods and looks out the window.
“Are you sad?” she asks.
“What would I have done with a baby?”
She shrugs. “I dunno, cuddle it?” It’s so true. That’s what I could have done. I flop back on the bed and let the hot silent tears fall onto her duvet. She gets up from the dressing table stool and comes to lie next to me.
