what I felt and believe what I believed. But now I know that me is fluid and shape-changing. So whatever you’re feeling now, it’s temporary. But what will happen to that family if they find out about their father’s betrayal will have repercussions forever. The damage will never heal.”
Fat tears coalesce in the rims of SJ’s eyes and drop heavily onto her cheeks. Laurel thinks she sees her nod but she’s not quite sure.
“Why did you and your husband split up?”
“Because of Ellie. Because I didn’t think he was hurting enough. Because he tried to make me believe that things would be OK, and I didn’t want things to be OK.”
“Did it hurt your children when you split up? Do they hate you?”
The question takes Laurel by surprise. Not did they hate you, but do they hate you. She thinks of last night’s awful phone call from Blue and Jake. She thinks of Hanna’s refusal to engage with her on anything other than a very shallow level of human interaction, and the way both her children keep her at arm’s length. She’s always put it down to their responses to losing their sister when they were both at such a vulnerable age. She can’t even remember how they reacted to Paul moving out. The separation was played out so slowly it was hard to pinpoint the moment it had actually ended. She doesn’t remember tearful recrimination, she doesn’t remember her children hurting, or at least hurting any more than they’d already been hurting.
“I don’t know,” she replies. “Maybe. But then we were already a broken family.”
SJ nods; then she unfurls her limbs, sits forward in her chair, and engages Laurel on a different level entirely. “I’ve been reading lots of stuff about it. About Ellie. On the Internet.”
“Have you?”
“Yes. I mean, I was only a kid in 2005 so I’d never heard of Ellie Mack before. And now, well, it’s sort of weird that you’re here, in my dad’s house, and that this hideous terrible thing happened to you, a thing that just doesn’t happen to people. And I keep thinking . . .” She pauses. “Do you believe that she ran away?”
Laurel feels herself almost physically pushed backward by the unexpectedness of the question.
“No,” she says softly. “No I don’t. But then I’m her mother. I knew her. I knew what she wanted and where she was heading and what made her happy. And I know she wasn’t stressed about her GCSEs. So no, deep down I don’t believe she ran away. But I have to because the evidence is all there.”
“The burglary, you mean?”
“Yes, the burglary. Except I don’t think of it as a burglary. She used her key. She just came home to collect some things. That’s all.”
“But . . . the bag. Don’t you ever wonder about the bag?”
“The bag?”
“Yes. Ellie’s rucksack. The one they found in the forest. Don’t you think, I don’t know, but surely after all those years on the run she’d have had some different things in it? Not just the things she had when she ran away from home?”
A chill runs through Laurel. She thinks of the hours she spent asking herself the same question at the time. Eventually she’d made peace with the theory that Ellie had deliberately kept a bag with her things from home in it as a kind of security blanket, in the same way that Laurel had kept Ellie’s bedroom untouched for most of the years that she was missing.
“And you know,” SJ continues, “there’s another thing, something really strange, about Poppy’s mum—” She stops talking and they both turn at the sound of the door opening. It’s Floyd. He’s holding two mugs of tea and he throws Laurel a grateful look.
“There you go,” he says, putting the mugs down on the table and then sitting down next to Laurel. “Medicinal tea. For frayed nerves. Everything OK?”
Laurel touches Floyd’s leg and says, “We’ve had a good chat.”
“Yes,” agrees Sara-Jade. “It’s been a good chat. I’m going to think about things.”
Laurel and Sara-Jade exchange a look. They have started a conversation that needs to be finished. But it will have to wait for another time.
25
The next morning Laurel awakes late and full of unsettling dreams. It takes her a moment to place her surroundings; they’ve conflated themselves with something she dreamed about. But a second later she remembers that she is in Floyd’s bed, that it is Wednesday, that it is nearly nine, and that she really,