by Emma Rowley
“Well, no point worrying about what people write,” said Mark shortly. He was starting not to like to talk about it so much.
“A lot of expectation”—I read the words again, in black and white.
“Well, that’s wrong,” Mark said aloud, reading over my shoulder. “That’s only what we paid for this place when we bought it, it’s worth a lot more now. See, they can’t get anything right.” I’d nearly hit him.
The coverage dried up soon enough, anyway. A pair of boarding-school sweethearts used their parents’ credit cards to buy flights to Antigua and refused to come home, pushing Sophie’s humdrum runaway story off the newspaper pages. Even before the investigation ground to a halt.
“Yes, they said what happened in the papers,” I say now. “But what did you think?”
“Well,” Holly says carefully. “I know it was hard for her, that she needed to get good grades. But I didn’t always know exactly what was going on with her. She wasn’t always that . . . easy to ask.”
“But you were so sure of yourself.”
“I was a teenager,” she says, with emphasis. I hide a smile—she can’t be more than eighteen, but I know what she means. “That’s what I wanted everyone to think. Sophie liked me when I knew what I was doing, when we were having fun. She just didn’t like it so much when I messed things up.”
“Like when you had that pregnancy scare?” I blurt it out. Holly had been sitting at my kitchen table when I’d come home that night, her feet up on the chair next to her. “Hello, Kate. Isn’t that a nice bag, been shopping again?” I’d said she could call me by my first name. I regretted it.
The girls had disappeared upstairs with pizza to get ready. They were going out that night, just round to Emily’s from school, they said. They’d rushed out when someone’s car beeped outside, and later I’d gone into Sophie’s room to collect their plates. I had taken the wastepaper basket with me too, seeing the liner overflowing.
They’d buried it at the bottom, so it was bad luck really that when I’d tipped the contents into the outside bin that I’d recognized the packaging immediately: “99% accurate.”
Mark was away with work, in a different time zone, so I poured myself a glass of cold white wine, and sat there at the kitchen table, thinking. Fifteen. Sophie still had a few months to go until her birthday. Under the age of consent, technically, but perhaps not all that surprising.
I’d still been there when the girls had clattered back in, their faces falling as they saw what I had on the table.
“It’s mine,” Holly said immediately, her usual swagger gone. “I’m sorry, but I couldn’t do it at home. It’s all fine, I promise. I just had to check. Please don’t tell my mum.”
Maybe I should have. But she looked so worried, I’d just nodded. “You need to be more careful, Holly.” Sophie, bless her, had looked even more scared. At least she was taking it seriously.
They’d both sat there, subdued, while I’d booked Holly in online right there and then to an appointment at the family planning center in town. Afterward, I’d felt pleased with myself for dealing with an awkward situation so understandingly. I could do this, I could help Sophie navigate the teenage years.
“No, not the pregnancy scare,” says Holly across the table from me, drawing me back to the present. “No. I mean when I would get upset. My mum and dad . . . I had a lot going on.” She hunches her shoulders. “It was a good thing when they split up.”
“Can I get you ladies anything else to drink?” The waiter’s hovering over us, all smiles. “Tea, coffee?” He gives a happy little shrug. “Nice glass of fizz?”
“Fancy it? I will if you will,” I say.
“I won’t thanks. I’ve got to drive,” she adds. “My parking will run out soon.”
But now she’s here in front of me, I suddenly want to keep her here, this link with Sophie.
“Do you still keep in contact with Danny, Holly? Sophie’s old boyfriend?”
She pauses, fiddling with the pink pompom on her car keys. “I do, yes. Look—” she lifts up her head, looks me in the eye—“I talked about this with him. That’s why I agreed to meet you. I don’t want you stirring things up for us, it’s not fair. It’s been hard as it is.”
I’m a step behind. “Stirring up—you’re together?”
“Yes,” she says, serious. “It’s not a secret. We just haven’t . . . been rubbing it in people’s faces.”
“Since when?” The words come out before I can stop them: “How do you think Sophie would feel about this?” I am suddenly angry: my daughter’s best friend and her boyfriend. That old cliché.
“I don’t know how she’d feel.” Her chin’s up now, patches of red creeping up her neck. “She’s been gone a long time now. If she cared—”
“Sorry,” I say, my flash of anger receding as quickly as it came. “It’s not my place.”
“. . . if she cared about him or me,” she’s relentless, “if she cared about any of us, she’d have come back.” She adds, softer now: “I missed her a lot. He did too. We started spending more time together. And, you know . . .”
“Fine, I get it. I’m sorry I asked.” I want to go home and shut the door. Sophie’s disappearing from their lives. Like a stone thrown into a pond, and even the ripples are now fading away. I motion for the bill, the waiter flapping a little—it’s obvious the mood’s changed—when it occurs to me.
“Sophie did care about you,” I tell Holly. I really want her to understand this, for some reason. “When I found the package in the bin—your pregnancy test—I wasn’t happy about it. At all. She stuck up for you.”
Sophie had been so earnest in her defense of Holly: “You can’t get her mum involved, you don’t understand. She’s a good girl.” It’s hard to remember a time when the specter of teenage pregnancy seemed like the worst thing that could happen to a family.
“She really stuck up for you,” I repeat.
“Well, that was the least she could do,” says Holly. She’s looking around to catch the waiter’s eye to hurry him, when she says it, casually: “After all, it was her test.”
“It was her test? What—how?”
She shrugs, a touch impatient. “She was with Danny then. We were teenagers, it wasn’t such a big deal.”
It’s now my turn to feel my face grow hot. I can almost hear Sophie: “God, Mum, you’re so nosy. I need some space!” Her bedroom door slammed shut.
“I—I didn’t realize they were that . . . serious.”
Holly’s mouth quirks. “Well. It’s not something I talk about with him now. But, evidently.”
“Why did you lie?”
“You’d have freaked out. That would’ve been the end of Sophie going out for a while, wouldn’t it?”
I can’t argue with that.
“Does it even matter now?” she says. “It’s ancient history.” She pushes her empty cup away. “You might not like it, but we don’t talk about that time—about Sophie—now. We’re thinking about the future.” She picks up her bag, ready to go. “I know it must be hard. But I don’t know why she never came back.”
“OK,” I say, with a slow nod. “I understand. Let me get this bill. Bye, Holly.”
She’s already out of her chair. “Bye, Kate.”
It still doesn’t sound right.
CHAPTER 10
I’m nearly home again, about to turn into my drive, when a flash of red ahead catches my eye: Lily’s front door, swinging open. I feel a pulse of alarm and continue past the fork that leads to my house and up to hers, parking on the pebbled drive in front of her cottage.
“Lily?” I call, running in. “Lily, are you OK?”
I find her in the living room, standing in the corner. She’s wringing her hands, her eyes unfocused. “Lily,” I say softly, “what’s wrong?”
“He’s gone,” she says. “The little boy. He’s gone again. . . .” Uh oh. I settle her in a chair, head to the kitchen and make her a cup of tea. Normally she settles down after a
minute or two when she’s confused. When I come back she’s still in her chair but staring out of the window, her blue eyes filled with tears.
“Oh, Lily, what’s wrong?”
“My boy. I can’t find him.”
“Which little boy is this, Lily?”
“My little boy,” she says impatiently. “I’ve been looking all over. I can’t find him.”
“Do you want me to help you look?” I say slowly. I seem to remember you’re not supposed to contradict them when they’re muddled.
“I’ve looked all over. I’ve been all round the house, I called in the garden. But I couldn’t remember his name!” She’s clasping and unclasping her hands in her lap. “He’s gone, he’s gone.” She’s so upset that I try to bring her back to the present. I kneel down by her side.
“I don’t think there is a little boy. Do you remember, Lily? It’s OK, no one’s here now.”
She seems to calm down, after that. But I make a mental note to find out what help there is for her. Because this is not working.
I don’t bother making dinner myself. I assemble crackers on a plate, a smear of hummus, cut up an apple, and eat it standing up, trying to work out the source of my unease. Lily will be OK, surely. I can sort it. But my conversation with Holly has got under my skin. I feel fidgety, off-kilter.
Even I can see that Sophie’s friends need to get on with their lives, that they can’t stay stuck in the past, like me. But our conversation has shifted my view of their friendship, something that had seemed as clear to me as the sky was blue: Sophie was the quieter, responsible one, Holly the adventurer, pushing the boundaries. Was that not quite the case?
I wonder what else I might be wrong about.
I sit on the sofa and flick on the TV with the remote, scrolling through the channels, unseeing. I flick it off again, then pick up one of my old magazines from the coffee table. The silence I welcomed when I moved here presses down on me, a thick blanket I can almost feel. My beautiful, empty home. Suddenly I’m shockingly, furiously angry. How could she do this to us? To me?
I can feel the tears pressing in my throat, the grief about to come. I’d rather stay angry. I throw the magazine in my hand, the pages arcing through the air to the carpet. I don’t feel better. So I go, quite deliberately, to the mantelpiece and knock the vase of flowers onto the floor, water and petals spilling everywhere.
It’s satisfying. So I make a clean sweep of my tasteful ornaments. The heavy jade elephant, there it goes. And there goes the carriage clock, a present from Mark’s parents. I never liked it much anyway! The cards behind it flutter to the floor in its wake.
I stop short, remembering that I keep them propped up there. I didn’t know what else to do with them. I didn’t want to hide them away: the reason we think she’s OK.
I crouch, carefully plucking them out of the debris on the carpet. I’m sorry, Sophie. I’m not angry. Fat tears drop down. I make sure they don’t mark the cards, as I lay them on my glass coffee table, pictures up, in a row. They’re fine. Then I turn them over. No smudges. No bends. They’re fine. The card on top is showing signs of age, the ballpoint pen ink darker. I’d recognize that handwriting anywhere, though.
The first one arrived a fortnight after she’d gone. I came downstairs that morning and saw it on the mat, under a gas bill and a circular for a new Chinese takeaway. The photo was of a beach, curving yellow sand under a bright blue sky, the red script in the top left-hand corner shouting: SPAIN! I turned it over. The address started “Kate and Mark Harlow.” The message itself was brief.
I know you’ll be worrying. Please don’t. I’m safe and I’m well. I love you.
Sophie xxx
The card trembled in my hand. Sophie had always written like she was in a tearing hurry, her words looping across the page. And there was her doodle in the corner next to her name, like she always did, a happy little flower.
Everyone had been positive. This was what we’d been waiting for: a solid development. Not only that, but Sophie had deliberately got in touch, reached out to us. We’d handed it in to the police. They’d been circumspect as ever, but I could see it in Kirstie’s face: this was Good News.
What it meant was less clear. It was postmarked London. “Could she could have got someone to post it for her, maybe? A friend passing through?” Mark wondered aloud.
He took it upon himself to make the calls, spread the news through the web of friends and family, his parents, my dad, my sister, all the rest.
“Well yes. It’s very encouraging really . . . we can all breathe a little easier.” There’d even been some rueful laughter. I could imagine what they were saying at the other end of the line. That Sophie. Well, really. But we knew she’d come back home eventually, they always do.
Afterward, he’d opened a bottle of champagne, poured it out into our best flutes and handed me one. As I stayed silent, he’d gripped me by the arms. I’d been shocked. There were tears in his eyes, I registered, as he told me: “It’s going to be OK, I promise. Maybe you can relax, just a little?”
I think I nodded. But I couldn’t. It was like hoping that turning off a tap might halt a flood.
Soon, the police came back to us: the expert agreed that this was her handwriting. But as to how it got to us, they didn’t know much more. My visions of them tracking the card back to the postbox where it was sent, pulling CCTV to show a small figure slipping it into the slot, soon faded. The postmark showed it was processed in north London, that was all.
We learned that what goes through the postal system gets covered in strange traces of all sorts, chemicals and blood and things you would rather not know about. Still, they managed to collect some prints off the card, ran them through the database just in case: nothing alarming came up, no matches with sinister prison escapees, anything like that.
And the news that she’d sent us a postcard sparked more media interest, the articles taking on a lighter tone that I didn’t expect: Sophie appearing as a cheeky rebel on a jaunt, sending a postcard home to the parents. One columnist asked if she should be commended for her spirit of adventure, another if her departure would have drawn the same concern if she were a boy. There was a warning note, however, about the drain on police time, a reminder that serious cases needed attention.
And then . . . nothing happened. Not for a while.
Eventually I did stop going out searching, which made Mark calmer for a bit, reassured that I wasn’t wandering through some abandoned warehouse in the city. Wherever she was, I’d realized, it wasn’t within my reach—not physically.
Going out had got trickier, anyway, close to home.
“So. You only had the one child,” the woman said to me, rearranging her handbag on her arm. “And then you went back to work?”
“Yes,” I said, taken aback. I tried to place her name. A mother from the school? She’d come up to me outside the newsagent’s, patting me on the arm: “How are things? Any news?”
“So why was that?” she said, then, not hiding her curiosity. No, I didn’t know her at all.
“Why w—I’m sorry, my parking’s about to run out. I’d better go.”
So I went online, where I started trawling message boards, special ones for runaways, expat communities that a traveler might pass through, forums for postal workers who might keep an eye out on their rounds. I’d leave a photo with a note: “Have you seen Sophie Harlow?” Keeping my messages loving, worried, but encouraging. Never desperate, never angry. Keep it together.
There was no end to the task I’d set myself, really. There didn’t seem to be so much reason to leave the house then, after that, or to step away from the laptop in our study. I drank, a little, to help me relax. And I had the pills, of course, to soften things round the edge, to help me sleep. I kept busy.
Mark tried to talk, a few times. He even suggested, sheepishly, that he “explain about that weekend.” I knew he meant the night he missed Sophie’s note. There hadn’t been many slip-ups over the years. But now I didn�
��t care. “I just don’t want to talk about it,” I told him. He looked relieved. He’d started going back into the office, just “keeping on top of things.”
The journalists didn’t bother to call me anymore. Though that was all the police seemed to be interested in, now: a phone call. Could Sophie please ring them so they could establish her safety? In my mind, I filled in what was unsaid: so we can close your case.
The second postcard came in December, dropping onto the mat like before.
You’ll want more than a postcard. But I’m fine, really, and I’m happy. I don’t want you to worry.
Sophie xxx
With her usual flower signature. “France,” read the script across the front, on top of a dated-looking photograph of the Eiffel Tower. Again, the postmark was London.
This time there was no champagne.
The next night, Mark’d come home punchy after his work Christmas drinks—I hadn’t gone, of course. “Don’t you think it’s time to stop this? What’s it all for, really?”
I turned to see him at the door of the study, where I was on the computer, as usual. There was a slurry edge to his voice. “You’re drunk, Mark.”
“Maybe,” he said. “But you’re one to talk. Holed up in here all the time.”
I stayed quiet.
“With your pills,” he continued, “hiding away.”
In the argument that followed, I finally said it, what I’d held back from telling him for so long. “If you’d seen that note, if you hadn’t been where you were, things might have been different.”
He stiffened. But he didn’t back down like I expected.
“And some people might say this all happened because of you. Overprotective, because of your mum. And now you’re trying to make up for it.”
“Oh, really,” I said coolly, hearing the echo of someone else’s judgement in his words. “And who exactly told you that bit of pop psychology?”