fence, the wood splintering my fingers as I call her name into the silent park. A dim sulfur glow comes from the municipal lighting that edges the path, but there’s no movement, only shadow.
In the spring—when I was still clinging to the pretense that I wasn’t doing anything wrong—Sophia ran away. She’d been in bed, Mina and I watching TV in the sitting room, and we’d heard her footsteps on the stairs. A second later, the front door had banged. I looked up, saw the same alarm in Mina’s face I knew must be in mine. We jumped up, ran outside—me barefoot, Mina in slippers—and split up, running in opposite directions, shouting her name.
Twenty minutes later, I’d come back to the house, frantic with worry. Sophia was eating a biscuit at the kitchen table, calm as you like. I put my arms around her, relief rushing into my embrace, and felt her stiffen for a split second, the way she always does.
“Where were you?” I demanded, relief turning to anger.
“Here.”
She’d never left the house. She’d opened the door, then slammed it, hiding behind the heavy curtain we pull across on winter nights. She’d watched us run like lunatics into the street, heard the panic in our voices as we called her name.
“I wanted to see if you’d look for me,” she said, and her tone was dispassionate, almost clinical, as if she were conducting a scientific experiment.
“It’s not normal,” I said later when Mina had checked Sophia was definitely asleep and I’d screwed a bolt on the door, too high for her to reach.
“Oh, that’s a lovely thing to say about your daughter.”
“I didn’t say she isn’t normal, I said her behavior isn’t normal. She needs professional help. Counseling, something. It’s not enough to stick labels on her and send us away with some leaflets. I mean, God, Mina, I don’t know how much more of this I can cope with.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
I didn’t know myself.
“You’re going to leave us?”
“No!”
“Or maybe you want to give her back!” She spat out the words, but that wasn’t the worst bit of that night. The worst bit was that, in the silence that followed, she realized I’d already been forming the same thought.
“Of course not,” I said, too late for it to count.
I burst into the kitchen, where Becca’s still sitting on the counter. “Sophia’s not there.”
“She was literally there a second ago.” Becca’s mouth falls open, and she looks around the kitchen as though I might be mistaken, that Sophia is right here next to me. “I just came in a minute ago.” She slides onto her feet, her mobile clattering onto the counter.
“Which is it, Becca, a second or a minute?” I’m not interested in her answer. I call Sophia’s name again, trying for the balance between come out right now and I’m not angry. “Could she have come in without you noticing?”
Becca’s gone to the open back door, calling for Sophia over and over, her voice thick with fear. “I don’t know. Maybe.”
I search the house, snapping into work mode and moving systematically from one room to another. Tramping snow through the house, I look in the bathroom and in the airing cupboard, and I open the door to the damp cellar beneath the kitchen, even though Sophia can’t reach the key. She isn’t inside, and when I go back out to the garden, I see something I’ve missed. There’s a loose board at the bottom of the fence, held in place by an upturned plant pot. Only the plant pot isn’t there anymore, and the space where it was is empty of snow. I crouch down and lift the board, exposing a gap plenty big enough for a child to crawl through. Caught on the wood is a piece of red wool.
Behind me, Becca starts crying. “What if something happens to her?”
She’s just a kid herself, but that doesn’t stop me being angry. We’re paying her to watch Sophia, not piss about playing Candy Crush or messaging lads. Worst-case scenarios race through my head, each one made worse still by a real-life counterpart. Murder, sexual assault, child trafficking—these are the foundations of my working life.
“Park,” I say. “Now.”
While Becca runs the long way—back through the house and around the corner, to the entrance to the park—I stand on the rickety garden chair and haul myself up onto the fence, throwing myself over and landing with a jolt that rattles my teeth. On the other side of the