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There’s a long silence. I look down at my hands. I’ve done exactly what I said I wouldn’t do: I’ve asked for her sympathy.
‘I don’t need to tell you what you did to me,’ Helen says,keeping her emotion in check with a visible effort. ‘When I went down to the beach and she wasn’t there. The terror. The panic. I felt like I was drowning. The pressure in my chest …’ She hesitates, collects herself. ‘I don’t need to tell you.’
‘I’m so sorry—’
‘All those nights when I couldn’t sleep,’ Helen says. ‘When I was imagining what’d happened to Flora, who might’ve snatched her. Themen.’ She stops again, remembering to whom she is speaking. ‘I prayed it was someone like you who’d taken her. A woman who’d lost her own child and needed mine. Someone who’d look after her; love her, even. I prayed, and I promised God, if Flora was returned to me, safe and well, I wouldn’t ask for anything else.Just bring her back to me.That was the bargain I made.’
My throat closes. I’ve made the same pleas, the same promises.
Helen’s knuckles turn white as her hands twist together in her lap and I know how much this is costing her. ‘I promised I’d take the gift of my daughter and let everything else go,’ she says. ‘I promised I wouldn’t seek vengeance or punishment. No matter who’d taken her, if I got her back safe, I’d forgive them. And then a miracle happened.’ Her voice is suddenly filled with wonder. ‘Flora came back.’
We both know she’s right: itisa miracle. The police will have maintained a facade of optimism while they searched for Flora, but Helen must have googled the truth, as I did, and learned that, after the first three days, only one in twenty children who go missing are found alive. Murderers and paedophiles usually kill their victims long before that. And of those children who are recovered, nearly all are runaways or have been abducted by family members in custody disputes. After ten days, the chances that a child taken by a stranger will be returned safe and well are slim indeed.
After two years?
‘You were my miracle,’ Helen says. ‘You were my nightmare, and then you were my miracle.’
My daughter has been missing for seven hundred and seventy days. There’s been no verifiable sighting of her, no trace, in all that time. Now I know I didn’t see Lottie on the Tube after all, the tiny flame of hope I’ve cherished for the last five weeks has no oxygen to feed it. We’re back to square one.
In my heart, I know my child must be dead. But if Lottie is still alive,if, my prayer is that she’s been taken by a woman like me. A deluded, broken woman who believes my child is hers and is keeping her safe. I pray Lottie has forgotten me and thinks of this woman as her mummy. I pray she’s loved and warm and happy.
Helen stands. ‘I hope you find your daughter,’ she says. ‘I pray to God she comes back to you, as Flora did to me. And if she does, you have to pay it forward, Alexa, like I’m doing. You have to let the hatred and anger go. You have toforgive. That’s the deal you’ve done with the universe.’
And because I would do anything, agree to everything, to have Lottie home, I say yes.
