Then She Was Gone - Lisa Jewell Page 0,104
She rents out the miserable flat in Woodside Park and Laurel no longer needs to be her cleaning lady. Everything about their previous dynamic has been transformed. They are friends. And Hanna and Poppy are the best thing to come out of the horror of Ellie’s disappearance. Poppy hero-worships Hanna and Hanna adores Poppy. They are virtually inseparable.
Laurel catches Hanna’s eye across the room as they find their way to their seats. She smiles and Hanna winks at her and blows her a kiss. Her beautiful daughter. Her golden girl.
Laurel catches the kiss and holds it next to her heart.
EPILOGUE
The woman clutches the piece of paper inside her hands and stares desperately through the glass screen at the policewoman sitting there. She’d told her someone would be along in a minute but that was nearly half an hour ago and she really needs to get going before she gets a parking ticket and the frozen chicken breasts in the boot of her car start to defrost.
“Excuse me,” she says a minute later, “I’m really sorry but my parking’s about to run out and I really have to go. Could I just leave this here with you?” She holds up the piece of paper.
The policewoman looks up at her and then at the piece of paper, then back at her again. “Sorry?” she says, as though she’s never seen her before or been told about the paper.
“This letter,” the woman says, trying her hardest not to sound impatient. “The letter I found in a book I got from the Red Cross shop.”
“Right,” says the policewoman. “Sure. Let me take it.”
The woman hands the letter to the policewoman and watches as she reads it, watches her facial expression change from disinterest to alarm to sadness and then to shock. “Sorry,” she says, “tell me again where you found this?”
“I told you,” says the woman, her patience stretching very, very thin. “I bought a book last month from the Red Cross shop on Stroud Green Road. A Maeve Binchy. I only just got round to reading it last night. And this note fell out. It’s her,” she says, “isn’t it? It’s that poor girl? The one who had the baby in the basement?”
The policewoman looks up at her and the woman can see that her eyes are wet with tears. “Yes,” says the policewoman. “It is.”
Both of them let their eyes fall back to the letter then and they both fall silent as they reread it together, squinting to make out the minuscule words squashed tightly side by side on a tiny scrap of paper:
To anyone who finds this note [it begins], my name is Ellie Mack.
I am seventeen. Noelle Donnelly brought me to her house on 26 May 2005 and has kept me captive in her basement for about a year and a half. I have had a baby. I don’t know who the father is and I’m pretty sure I’m still a virgin. Her name is Poppy. She was born in around April 2006. I don’t know where she is now or who is looking after her but please, please find her if you can. Please find her and look after her and tell her that I loved her. Tell her that I looked after her for as long as I could and that she was the best little baby in the world. Also, please let my family know that you’ve found this note. My mum is called Laurel Mack and my dad is called Paul and I have a brother called Jake and a sister called Hanna and I want you to tell them all that I’m sorry and that I love them more than anything in the world and that none of them must feel bad about what happened to me because I am brave and I am brilliant and I am strong.
Yours sincerely,
Ellie Mack
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I finished writing this book in December 2016. I read it through and thought, hmm, this is either brilliantly bizarre, or just bizarre. I’d lost all objectivity and passed it to my editor with no worldly clue how she would respond.
A few days later she said, let’s meet up, I have a radical suggestion. I knew then that my book was simply bizarre.
She said that she and another editor had spent ages together brainstorming my book, trying to find a way to balance out the bizarreness. And they’d had a light-bulb moment. And her suggestion was indeed radical.
I said, yes, yes, of course. That’s brilliant, you’re brilliant. Thank you!
And now I’d like to say thank you again to Selina Walker and Viola Hayden for being brave and clear-minded, for sitting together with my bizarre pile of paper and talking and thinking and talking and thinking and seeing exactly what needed to be done and then telling me exactly how to do it. People might think that writers are possessive of their work, think that no one but them can possibly know how it should be. But a sensible writer knows that’s not true. Sometimes the writer is the least able to see the solution and sometimes the editors are the geniuses. And this was definitely the case with this book. So thank you both again. I am so grateful to you.
And thank you, of course, to everyone else at Arrow: to Susan Sandon, Gemma Bareham, Celeste Ward-Best, Aslan Byrne, and everyone in the sales team.
Thank you to my agent Jonny Geller for being so enthusiastic about this book. And thank you to the rest of the team at Curtis Brown for everything you do to support me in my career. You’re all brilliant.
Thank you to my wonderful publishing team in the US, where, thanks to all your love and hard work, my career is going from strength to strength. Thank you, Judith Curr, Sarah Cantin, Ariele Fredman, Lisa Sciambra, and Haley Weaver. Finally getting to meet you all last year was beyond special. You’re even better in real life!
And thank you to Deborah Schneider, my American agent (and birthday twin!). You’ve worked so hard on my behalf for so long and it was incredible to spend some time face-to-face with you in London last year after nearly a decade of emailing. You are amazing.
Thank you to all my foreign publishers. I am so grateful to be published so widely and so beautifully by so many incredible teams of people around the world. Thanks especially to Pia Printz in Sweden, for not only publishing me so beautifully, but for inviting me into your world, taking me for dinner, and keeping me up way past my bedtime! Thanks also to Anna, Frida, and Christoffer. You’re all so lovely.
Thank you to the booksellers, the librarians, and the book buyers and to all the people who help get my books to the readers. And thanks to all the amazing book bloggers out there. Thanks for the reviews and the posts and the photos and the tweets. I love you all! Thanks in particular to Tracy Fenton of the utterly legendary The Book Club on Facebook. What a powerhouse you are, and such a boon for readers and writers alike.
Thank you to my splendid family and friends. I am blessed with a high-quality abundance of both. And special thanks to the ones on the Board. We just get better with age!
But mostly, thank you to my readers, new ones and old ones, loyal or occasional. I am so grateful to you all for spending your hard-earned money on stuff I’ve written and allowing me to keep on writing more stuff. You are all amazing.
A NOTE ON THE CHARACTER NAME OF “SARA-JADE VIRTUE”