He whispers into my ear, ‘Let me make you feel it.’
‘Jack,’ I scream. His name is the only word I can find.
But this isn’t Jack – this is a stranger.
I think back to us as children racing down to the little beach.
The stranger clamps a hand over my mouth and tells me to be quiet.
I think of Jack bringing croissants to my house first thing in the morning.
The stranger yanks my underwear down my thigh.
I think of Jack sitting beside me on his big green sofa with a glass of wine and a smile. The sound of a zipper brings me back to myself. He leans away, unhooking the button of his jeans with his thumb. I bring my knee up into his crotch. He lets go of my wrists to clutch his groin, cheeks puffing, and I scramble from beneath him, slip-sliding on the slick mud. I pull my knickers up and then I am running.
He bellows my name.
I crash through the woods, banging into trees that seem to spring up in my path. My legs are elastic bands that have been pulled too tight. Bark bites into my skin as I squeeze between trunks. Sharp twigs and thorns from bracken slice and scratch as I run. I hear my heart soaring all around, feel blood rushing in rivers through my veins.
He howls for me. He’s close. Still running, I look over my shoulder. Face twisted in fury, he bears down. If he gets his hands on me, he won’t stop. Panic takes flight in my chest like a murder of crows. Then the ground vanishes beneath me and I am falling, tumbling down, down, down.
Sky becomes earth and earth becomes sky. There’s a sharp pain in my skull and, finally, I am still. Everything is blurry and slow. I blink up at the light filtering through the canopy even as black roses bloom across my vision. Warm wetness pools at my temple. Jack is high above me, clutching a tree on top of the bank. He is shouting – I see the angry red of his open mouth – but I am too far under water to hear him.
As he skids down the slope towards me, a final black rose blossoms, and everything sinks into darkness.
Chapter Thirty-Two
35 Days Missing
Adaline Archer
Dad was arrested. That’s right, sis, arrested. I keep replaying the moment he was handcuffed. I just stood on the street thinking I must be in some bizarre reality TV show because this couldn’t possibly be happening.
It started with another solo fishing trip which Dad insisted on leaving for in the early hours. There was a storm last night and it was still wet and windy today, so I was surprised he didn’t reschedule. But our parents do look for any excuse to avoid one another these days. With Dad taking off on more fishing weekends and Mum spending more nights in my guest room, they aren’t in one another’s company very often. I’ve tried inviting them over for dinner but they’re like the north side of two magnets; they just can’t seem to come together. You hear of it a lot though, don’t you? When a couple loses their child, it can split a marriage. I see how our parents struggle every day you are gone, and I wonder if Mum still believes it will be a tragedy if I never have children. Because, if I’m never a mother, I will never suffer the loss or disappearance of a child I’ve raised. That, at least, is a blessing. It’s hard enough losing a sister. Sometimes, I want to ask Mum, if she could erase the memory of you to ease the pain, would she? I think I would.
Anyway, with Dad out of town, it was up to me to drive Mum to the train station this afternoon. She’d planned a visit to her friends in Kent for a few days. At first, I didn’t think it was a good idea, Mum leaving in the middle of all this, but then I looked at her tired, thin face and knew she needed a break.
‘Phone me when you get there,’ I told her on the platform.
‘Don’t you worry about me, love. Trish will take good care of me,’ she said. ‘You just look after your dad, okay?’
At home, I was greeted with a familiar noise: the burr of the hoover. Strange since it wasn’t in my hand. I stepped into the lounge to see the rarest of sights: my husband in his relaxed weekend garb, enthusiastically hoovering with his wireless headphones on, singing an off-key rendition of ‘Wild Thing’ by The Troggs, and I felt a squeeze of affection for him.
Sensing my presence, he looked over and his face split into a smile to match my own. He turned off the hoover and removed his headphones. ‘Hello, gorgeous.’
Gorgeous. He called me gorgeous when we started dating. As soon as we married though, I became ‘darling’, which I’m sure he saw as an upgrade because that’s what his father calls his mother, but it makes me feel middle-aged. ‘Who’s the murder victim?’
He frowned. ‘What?’
‘You’re cleaning, which means you’ve either had a stroke or you’re covering up a crime.’
‘Oh har-har,’ he said. ‘I know you’ve been under a lot of stress recently, so I thought I’d help out.’ He brandished the hoover nozzle. ‘Do some cleaning.’
‘I like it.’
‘Yeah?’
I sashayed over to him. ‘Nothing gets me wetter than a man with a hoover in his hand.’
‘Oh really?’ He raised his eyebrows. ‘Well then, you should see what I can do with a mop.’
He wound an arm around my waist and pulled me to him, ‘Wild Thing’ still playing through the discarded headphones on the coffee table. He kissed me. I know you’d roll your eyes and say something like, ‘Running the hoover round once in a blue moon doesn’t mean you owe your husband a quickie on the sofa,’ but this was Ethan really trying. So I let him fuck me over the arm of our custom-made sofa, and when he’d all but skipped upstairs for a shower, cleaning forgotten, I picked up the hoover and finished the lounge.
‘What’s this?’ The voice at my back was so gravelly, it took me a moment to realise it belonged to Ethan.
I turned around and stared at the little packet squeezed between his fingers. My contraceptive pills. You’d ramble and babble like you always do when you’re caught out. I, on the other hand, go cold and hard like stone, so I stared at my husband and said, ‘You know what it is.’
‘I thought we’d stopped using protection.’
‘We had. Then I changed my mind and started taking it again.’ I lifted my chin. ‘Why were you going through my drawers?’
‘I was putting away laundry.’ He shook the packet and the pills rattled in their foil prison. He was so very angry with me. ‘Why’re you taking them again?’
I could’ve lied, maybe I should’ve, but I’d spent so much time pretending to other people, I wanted to be honest with my husband. ‘You’re never here. You’re always working. If we had a baby, I’d be the one taking care of it all by myself.’
‘That’s your fucking job.’
I inhaled sharply. ‘Excuse me?’
‘I’m not discussing this,’ he said. ‘Get rid of the pills. All of them.’
I was angry and I was caught, but mostly, I was angry. ‘You never discuss things with me. You simply lay down the law and expect me to follow it. Talk to me.’