‘Look, all I want to do is to see you and to talk, Alicia. That’s not too much to ask, is it? We had something good once. We shouldn’t be pulling each other apart. We can work together on this, can’t we?’
‘I don’t want to see you, Paul,’ Alicia repeated forcefully. ‘There are no circumstances under which I want to meet you, don’t you see? I love my husband.’
Paul went quiet.
Alicia waited. He was still there. She could hear him breathing.
‘I think you might want to see me, Alicia,’ he said, eventually, ‘given the results of the paternity test.’
Oh God, no. Alicia closed her eyes, feeling sick and claustrophobic, the noise of the kettle boiling and the clink of the cups behind her grating on her nerves, as the room closed in on her.
‘I don’t want to cause any upset, Alicia, I promise you. I just want to do what’s best,’ Paul continued, sounding quite calm. Kind, almost. Reasonable.
Feeling as if she might be going slowly insane, Alicia scrambled feverishly through her muddled recollections. He couldn’t have. How could he have, unless… Had he been in touch with Sophie?
‘How?’ she asked him, her mouth dry, her throat parched. ‘How did you get a test done? You’d need to have something of hers.’ A toothbrush? A strand of her hair? She tried to think, hoping that he was lying. Yet, there was a part of her that was desperately hopeful that he might have seen her in the past week.
‘Her hairbrush,’ Paul supplied, killing all hope Alicia might have had dead. ‘When I was at the house.’
After they’d been burgled? When they’d just laid Lucas to rest?
‘You left me no choice, Alicia. I have a right to know. I think your husband has a right to know, too, don’t you?’ Paul said, as if anything could excuse the vileness of his actions. ‘I’ll leave it with you. I really do think we need to meet though, don’t you? For Sophie’s sake.’
Realising he’d ended the call, Alicia felt her blood run cold. What did he mean? A hard kernel of apprehension knotted inside her.
‘Not a good outcome then?’ Jessica enquired, glancing at her worriedly as she carried the tea to the table.
‘No. Struggling to draw air past the lump in her throat, Alicia shook her head wretchedly. ‘He claims to have had a paternity test,’ she murmured, her mind still reeling, her heart plummeting to the depths of her soul. ‘He’s calling her his daughter,’
‘Oh my God!’ Jessica stared at her, aghast. ‘You have to tell Justin, Alicia. He needs to know.’
Thirty-Nine
ALICIA
Coming into work had been a bad idea. If not for the little girl on her caseload who’d rung in claiming her father had deliberately burned her, she wouldn’t have. How could the mother have blamed the child, she wondered, bewilderedly. How could she have demanded that the child be removed from the family home, rather than the father, even after the hospital had concluded the injuries were non-accidental? Looking away from the manager who was heading the team meeting, Alicia swiped away a tear.
She couldn’t do this any more, she realised. How could she hope to remain detached, to try to hold families together – which had been her naive reason for wanting to do this in the first place – when she’d been responsible for tearing her own family apart? When her own daughter was missing? She’d often felt upset after the type of visit she’d had today, but this time she’d been devastated. She’d rushed straight from her car to the toilets, where she’d locked herself in a cubicle and sobbed her heart out.
She wasn’t any help to anyone like this, least of all the children. They needed someone who was level-headed, and strong enough to fight back for them.
Lost in her thoughts, her heart leapt in her chest when her phone buzzed. Justin, she realised, her pulse racing – though in a very different way to how it always had whenever he’d texted her before. Grabbing up her bag, she mouthed an apology to the manager and hurried towards the office exit, collecting her coat as she went.
Clutching her coat around her against the cutting wind, her thoughts immediately going to Sophie and how cold she might be, Alicia made her way to where Justin had said he’d parked and scoured the road, left and right. It was only when he flashed his lights that she remembered he wasn’t driving his own car any more, which had been written off the day their baby boy had died.
A crushing wave of grief washing over her, Alicia closed her eyes, working hard to compose herself before heading towards him. She felt as if she were hanging on by her fingernails, but she couldn’t let go in front of him. She knew that would only compromise him into offering her comfort he couldn’t possibly want to.
Sliding into the passenger seat, her heart missed a beat as she looked Justin over. He looked dreadful: unshaven, exhausted, his eyes those of a haunted man.
‘How are you?’ he asked her awkwardly.
She had no way to answer. ‘Getting through the days,’ she said, turning forwards as Justin fixed his gaze on the windscreen. He still couldn’t look her in the eye. Alicia didn’t blame him. She couldn’t look herself in the eye.
‘Have you spoken to him?’ he asked after a second, resting his hands on the steering wheel.
Alicia swallowed. ‘Yes,’ she said, and took a deep breath, bracing herself to tell him what she desperately didn’t want to. Lies hadn’t kept him safe. She had no idea how she’d ever hoped they would.
Justin simply nodded. ‘Do you think he might have been touch with her?’
‘I don’t know,’ Alicia answered honestly. ‘I think not, from the things he said. He hadn’t spoken to Sophie before she left. I’m not even sure he knows she’s missing.’
Justin ran his thumbs pensively along the steering wheel. ‘You’re not having in-depth conversations then?’ There was a sarcastic edge to his voice.
Alicia’s heart dipped an inch lower, if that were possible. ‘No,’ she said simply. To try to explain would mean to explain everything, and Justin had given her no indication he wanted to hear it. ‘I texted him this morning.’ On the back of what he’d said, she had no choice but to contact him. For Sophie’s sake, he’d said. She’d gone over it and over it. She thought he’d been talking about Sophie’s future, but there’d been something in his tone that she couldn’t quite figure out… ‘To ask him whether he’d been in contact with her,’ she went on. ‘He didn’t answer.’
Justin glanced at her, his expression a mixture of wariness and surprise.
‘His voicemail said he was at a one-day conference. I confirmed it with his office. He seems to be behaving perfectly normally.’
Again, Justin nodded. ‘You know where he works then?’ There was that sarcastic edge again to his tone, though now clouded with weary resignation.
‘Jessica knew, through her friend, David,’ she supplied, wanting to soften the blow she was about to deliver; knowing she couldn’t possibly. She’d never before reached a place where she’d thought life wasn’t worth living. Now, whenever she dozed, in the hours between the thin light of dawn and daylight – the only hours that sleep allowed her some escape – she would open her eyes to the harsh truth of an existence without the people she loved, and she simply didn’t want to be in this reality any more. If not for Sophie, for the further pain she would cause Justin, she doubted she would be.
‘There’s something I have to tell you,’ she said, feeling physically sick at the thought of delivering another knife wound to his chest. ‘Something he told me.’
Justin didn’t respond, stilling his hands on the wheel and seeming to brace himself instead.
‘He said he’d had a paternity test.’ There was no way to soften the news that would surely crush him. She waited, praying, futilely. How would he not be destroyed?