She listens for a minute. Can’t sleep, she mouths at me.
I get up and fill the kettle.
‘Well, I know it sounds mad,’ she begins. ‘But ...’
Fifteen minutes later, we stand at the doorway to our house.
Emma is wearing a waterproof and a beanie hat. She has tea, which I’ve made, and crisps; a couple of apples. It’s quarter past four in the morning and she is about to drive to Highbury Fields, to pick up Charlie, and then she’s going to drive six hours north to Alnmouth beach. Jeremy’s already gone to work. He’s on air at 6 a.m.
‘What will you tell Ruby?’ Emma asks. She tried to wake Ruby a few minutes ago, because she hadn’t seen her last night. ‘Hey,’ she whispered, as Ruby half-woke. ‘I just came to give you a quick kiss, because I’m off to—’
‘Go away,’ said Ruby’s voice, in the darkness. ‘You’re squashing me.’ So that was that.
‘I’ll work something out. But she’ll be fine. She was having a brilliant time with Oskar and Mikkel yesterday evening. She’d no idea we thought you were missing.’
‘I don’t want her to feel like I’ve just abandoned—’
‘She won’t.’ My voice is firm, because Emma needs it to be. ‘Ruby knows you’re her servant. She’s very comfortable with it.’
Outside a bird is making tentative song. His call goes unanswered, but he tries again, and again.
‘I can’t ask you to forgive me,’ Emma says, after pausing to listen to the bird. We’re standing so close I can smell the warm tiredness of her skin. I close my eyes, imagining how it would feel to just lean my face into her hair, to slide my arms around her and pretend she is the Emma I know and trust.
‘I can’t ask you to forgive anything I’ve done,’ she says, quietly. ‘But I need to do this for him. I hope you can understand.’
And I can. I’d do anything for Ruby. We would all do anything for our children.
‘I just need to ask you one thing,’ I say.
‘Of course.’
‘And I beg you, Emma, please answer honestly.’
She stands on the garden path, framed by tangled creepers and trailing ivy.
‘If Janice hadn’t gone missing, if I hadn’t dug up all those clues – would you have told me?’
Emma looks at me for a long time.
‘No,’ she admits, eventually. ‘I don’t think I would.’
‘Right.’
She turns to go. ‘I love you, Leo.’
My eyes well. I don’t know if my grief is for Emma or for me. For Ruby, perhaps, or the chaotic, warm life the three of us have had together. I don’t know anything, other than that it’s only when something’s damaged beyond repair that we realise how beautiful it was.
Chapter Sixty-One
EMMA
Charlie and I park up on the beach at lunchtime. Nearby a family is unpacking bodyboards from a car. The children are arguing and the parents aren’t talking to each other, but somehow, everyone is OK. They’re a family. They share a car, a house; probably only the most inconsequential of secrets.
I’m not sure I will still have a family when I get back to London, but I’m focused only on Charlie now. Yesterday he was wearing shorts; today he’s wearing jeans. I want to know everything about him. Where he buys jeans – do his parents pay, or do they insist he earns his spending money? What is his summer job in Queens Park? How does he vote, where does he stand on Marmite? Did he shuffle round on his bum as a baby, like Ruby, or did he crawl?
When we stopped at service stations he bought exactly the snacks I’d expect an eighteen-year-old to buy. Large packets of sweets, greasy sausage rolls, crisps. He inhaled them, much in the manner John Keats inhales his bowl of dog food. I’m fascinated by this boy.
We took turns driving so the other could sleep, but all I could do was watch my grown-up son at the wheel of my car, an elbow resting on the door, taking measured swigs of an energy drink.
