the fishing boat once at home and the cold black sea tried to swallow me. Maggie squirts shampoo on my head and roughly rubs it into my hair. The yellow bottle says No More Tears, but I’m crying. When I am covered in soap from my head to my feet, she sprays me all over with cold water again. I try to keep still the way she tells me to, but my body shivers and my teeth chatter like they do in winter.
When she is finished, she dries me with a stiff green towel, then she marches me back to my new bedroom and sits me down on the bed covered in rainbows. I don’t have any clothes and I’m cold. She leaves the room for a moment, and I hear her talking to the man who said he was my new dad, even though I’ve never seen him before.
“She looks just like her,” he says, before Maggie comes back in with a glass of milk.
“Drink it.”
I hold the glass in both hands and take a couple of sips. It tastes chalky and strange, just like the milk she gave me in the house that was for holidays.
“All of it,” she says.
When the glass is empty, I see that she is wearing her smiley round face again, and I am glad. I don’t like her other one, it scares me. She opens a drawer and pulls out a pair of pink pajamas. She helps me to put them on, then makes me stand in front of the mirror.
The first thing I notice is my hair. It’s much shorter than it was the last time I saw myself and stops at my chin.
“Where has my hair gone?” I start to cry, but Maggie raises her hand so I stop.
“It was too long and needed cutting. It will grow back.”
I stare at at the little girl in the mirror. Her pink pajama top has a word written on it made of five letters: AIMEE. I don’t know what it means.
“Do you want a bedtime story?”
I nod that I would.
“Has the cat got your tongue?”
I haven’t seen a cat and I think my tongue is still inside my mouth, I wiggle it behind my lips to be sure.
She walks over to a shelf stacked with colorful magazines and takes the top one off the pile. “Can you read?”
“Yes.” I stick my chin out a little without knowing why. “My brother taught me.”
“Well, wasn’t that nice of him. You can read this to yourself then. There’s a whole pile of Story Teller magazines here, and cassette tapes, too, so you just go ahead whenever you want to. Gobbolino is your favorite.” She throws the magazine onto the bed. “The witch’s cat,” she adds, when I don’t say anything. I don’t even like cats so I wish she’d stop talking about them. “If you can read, then tell me what it says on your top.”
I stare at it, but the letters are upside down.
“It says Aimee. That’s your new name from now on. It means ‘loved.’ You do want people to love you, don’t you?”
“But I’m called Ciara.” I look up at her.
“Not anymore you’re not, and if you ever use that name under this roof again, you’ll find yourself in very big trouble.”
Fifteen
London, 2017
I’m in trouble.
The detective has clearly already made up her mind about me, but she’s wrong. The only thing I’m guilty of is fraud, the relationship variety. We all sometimes pretend to love something or someone we don’t: an unwanted gift, a friend’s new haircut, a husband. We’ve evolved to be so good at it, we can even fool ourselves. It’s more laziness than deceit; to acknowledge when the love has run out would mean having to do something about it. Relationship fraud is endemic nowadays.
As soon as the detectives leave, I lock the door behind them, desperate to shut the whole world out. I guess I can now add the police to the list of people who think they know me. They’re in good company, with the press, the fans, and my so-called friends. But they don’t know me. Only the version of myself I let them see. The wheels of my mind continue to drive in the wrong direction, stuck in reverse, and I relive that night, remembering things I’d rather not. We did argue in the restaurant. Detective Croft is right about that. Ben accused me of having an affair, again. I tried so hard to reassure him,