AllFreeNovel
Share Us
If she’s trying to scare me, should I not be scared? Surely the very fact that she might want to scare me is scary?
‘Let’s stay positive, Frankie.’ He hugs me and walks out of the foyer.
My phone rings. ‘Dan?’
Dan says something muffled and pain strikes into my heart.
Dan is my safe place. I’m not sure anything could make me feel better right now, but he’s the one I need holding me to get through this. But even he’s not safe any more. Has he felt the distance I’ve put between us these last few weeks?
The picture I tried so hard not to see swims in front of me, a skinny blonde woman reaching for her short-cropped hair as she straddles him, her back to the camera, his face serious, transfixed.
‘Oh God, Dan,’ I whisper.
‘Frances? What’s wrong?’
I want to throw the phone across the room. But whatever he’s done to me, he’s Jenna’s father. Maybe not technically, but he loves her like his own. I give my thigh a pinch and real, physical pain fills me, pushing out everything else, healing me.
‘I don’t know where she is?—’
‘She still isn’t home?’
‘No – I’ve called the police.’
‘You – Jesus Christ. Really?’
‘Yes, I had to.’
‘Right, okay.’ I can hear him taking a deep breath. ‘Jesus. Fran? You really think she’s missing?’
Why do people keep asking me that? I close my eyes. ‘I don’t know where she is.’
‘I’m on my way.’
We listen to each other’s silence. In the distance I think I can hear the dull rhythm of a helicopter.
36
NOW
I sit with my head between my knees, listening to the far-off thuds, until my father comes in.
‘Do you think maybe someone’s overindulged at the tea party?’ he asks, meaning I’ve had too much fruitcake, meaning I’m being silly. Which, really, when you think about it, is quite insulting, isn’t it?
I screw my eyes shut. I don’t want to fight my father. I need everyone to help me.
‘Frances, stop making a scene,’ he says.
And immediately I’m seventeen again, sitting on the terrace, trying to draw a rose in my sketchbook and producing a gnarled worm bristling with talons, and my father is saying, ‘Cover up,’ and I realise my shawl is on the ground and the shameful red lines high on my arms are showing.
But I’m not seventeen.
I’m a grown woman and suddenly I can see how cruel that was of him. How could he have looked at the cuts on his daughter’s arms and said that?
‘I’m not making a scene. I’m terrified.’
‘I don’t believe there’s any cause for that. But whatever the case, you are a Beaufort-Bradley.’ He doesn’t have to say the next bit: you will stand up straight and weather the storm. He puts a heavy hand on my shoulder.
I want to push him off. I want to tell him that he is the storm.
