bed.’
As we made our way down the hallway, our feet sticking at every step, Victor said, ‘My mum would also have completely lost her shit at a mess like this.’
My eyes prickled at his sweet vulnerability, my heart aching for his blissful ignorance. Would telling him the truth help? Would pulling Patrick out of the hat as a consolation-prize parent dull his grief for Ginny? Or would it simply lift the lid off his pain and strike it through with brightly coloured additives like a macabre raspberry ripple?
I climbed the stairs behind him, bidding him an awkward goodnight at the top. The mother in me longed to reach out and comfort him, the wife in me wanted to recoil from the physical evidence of the two people I loved most in the world deceiving me. As he disappeared into his room, an extra level of hideousness occurred to me: perhaps Patrick had resisted Victor coming to live with us precisely because he knew Victor was his son and realised that the secret he’d been sitting on for decades would come out. Which would make him a coward and a pretty shabby father. I put that thought to one side to be picked over later in favour of dealing with the drama in hand.
I hovered by Phoebe’s door. I turned the handle, bracing myself for a stream of abuse. The bed was unmade but no Phoebe. The window was ajar. I leaned out. Across the lawn, I could see footprints in the wet grass as far as the garden gate leading onto the lane beyond. I shut the window and closed her bedroom door.
I flopped onto my own bed, my mind flicking through possibilities. I debated texting her friends or ringing around. Even if I managed to find her, what then? Would she fight me? Would she swear at me? Refuse to come home? Was I really going to be that mother who knew her child was missing but did nothing? Was climbing out of her window and shinning down the wisteria to chase after a boy the same as missing? Probably not. Would the police even be interested? But what if something happened to her? I imagined answering a police officer’s question: ‘And what did you do when you understood your daughter had left the house?’
‘Lay on my bed’ didn’t feel like the parent-of-the-year answer, but what was the alternative? Waking up everyone in the village and pushing Phoebe further to the top of the list of troublemakers? Running around the streets hoping to stumble upon her behind a hedge with the at least nineteen-year-old, whatever his name was. I pushed my head back into my pillow. I should phone Patrick, share the burden. I stared at the text he’d sent, before I’d even arrived home.
I’m sorry. I love you.
So simple, yet so complex. But all of my love, all of my energy, veered towards my daughter. The triumph again of motherhood over marriage. It was incredible that any marriage survived the all-consuming needs of children.
And now Patrick had another child to prioritise. Would that mean he didn’t care as much as I did about Phoebe?
I sent one WhatsApp to her.
Phoebe, I know I was angry and you probably are too. Please come home so we can talk. I love you xx
I looked at the word ‘love’ and wondered if I even understood it any more. Nothing in my life felt love-filled.
I huddled under the duvet, my ears straining to hear footsteps on the gravel, my mind circling round and round what particular alchemy of personalities had made my child the one who hated her parents. I kept looking at my messages waiting to see whether she’d read it. After about an hour, I could see she’d seen it but no response. It was a sad state of affairs that I was relying on two blue ticks to indicate that somewhere, God knows where, my daughter was still alive.
While I waited to see whether Phoebe would come home, I picked through the detail of the whole period around that New Year’s Eve and when my dad died. I’d been hurt that Ginny had gone quiet between January and Easter. She’d phoned once or twice, but the time difference with Vancouver meant she was at work when it was our evening. We didn’t yet have a computer at home and we weren’t allowed to use email at work for personal things. Ginny flouted that rule spectacularly, but it made me nervous,