Anna—11 Months Ago
Cynthia can’t believe her ears.
Anna is safe and well, the voice on the phone tells her. Therefore, the police aren’t going to open a case. Everything is fine.
“She wanted us to reassure you,” the officer relays, “that she’s okay, but to let you know that she’d rather not resume contact, at least not at the moment. I’m sorry.”
There is a long pause before Cynthia speaks. She doesn’t believe a word of it.
“Washethere?” Cynthia asks.
“He?” the officer echoes.
“The boyfriend? This man I’ve never heard a word about until today? Was he living there with her, too? This is coercive control.”
The officer on the line is silent for a moment.
“Mrs. Derwent. No one else was living at the rental property with your daughter as far as I’m aware.”
By the time Cynthia hangs up, her decision is already made.
The drive to Anna’s old flat is a long one. Anna always said she chose it because it was near her office but as Cynthia makes the journey there now, she begins to wonder if Anna took the flat to be farther from her.
Cynthia knows she and her daughter weren’tcloseclose. Certainly, they didn’t talk about personal things. She never knew how to deal with Anna’s tears when she was younger, and after a while Anna had finally stopped coming to her with them. Cynthia was her mother, after all, not her best friend.
No doubt other mothers might do it differently but Cynthia herself hadn’t been raised that way.
So there is a chance, Cynthia allows herself to acknowledge, as she turns onto Anna’s old road, Anna may have kept things from her, a boyfriend, even.
Cynthia pulls her sports car into the spot she always used to park in, opposite Anna’s flat. She looks out at the run-down building.
It needs a spruce, she thinks to herself, always has. Little weeds somehow grow from the ledge above the porch. It was okay inside, Cynthia conceded, but visiting her always got Cynthia down. So much to fix in there, and no one ever likely to do so.
Cynthia always found it odd that Anna never had any realdrive. Not like her. Cynthia married at twenty-one, and still managed a full career as a first-class air stewardess, and finally she had a baby. She has been a good mother; she knows she has. She “ran a tight ship,” Jim used to joke. She misses Jim, especially now.
Anna didn’t seem to want her own house, career, or nice things, apparently happy just to wallow in her office job, Cynthia thinks, and every now and then date no-hopers.
Cynthia shakes off the thoughts and pops her car door.
The landlord answers the door on the first ring, but this man is older than the one she spoke to before—perhaps she’ll get somewhere this time, she thinks.
“Hello, sorry to disturb you,” she apologizes, her smile warm. “I’m looking for my daughter, Anna Derwent, I think I must have spoken to your son before. Anna used to live here. The police told me she left a forwarding address with you?”
Cynthia has often found in life that saying things in a calm, feminine manner and looking someone dead in the eye gets more done than anything else.
—
Forty-five minutes later, Cynthia is knocking on the door of the address roughly scrawled by Anna’s old landlord on the back of a pizza flyer.
The woman who answers the door is not Anna, though she says she is. She is blond like Anna, about her height and body shape, butshe is not bestowed with thenaturalScandinavian good looks that Cynthia passed on to her daughter.
Cynthia does not tell the woman who she is. She can see how the police might have been fooled; these days, people rarely look like their photos.
But this woman is clearly not Anna, her clothes embellished with bursts of neon and sequins, her hair just the wrong side of clean, her voice betraying the throaty crackle of a smoker.
After much persuasion and the offer of money, Cynthia is invited into the woman’s flat.
Cynthia is given a watery tea at the woman’s kitchen table, and she puts down another fifty-pound note beside it on the table. The woman’s eyes flare.
