After her Skype call with Zeb, Emma wandered around her flat with an unsettled cloud in her stomach, eventually ending up back in her son’s empty room. She lay on his bed, looking at the framed Deadpool poster on the wall, trying to unpack everything he’d said to her.
Why couldn’t she stop thinking how strange Zeb and Freya’s encounter in the park seemed? Or fight the feeling that there was more to it than Zeb had revealed? Even though he’d been so angry with her for looking through his drawings—among all the other things he was angry about—she got up and retrieved his sketchbook from the drawer. She studied the picture of Freya until the girl seemed to come to life on the page, crying and confiding as to why she was upset.
It was this “why” that Emma now had to pass on to Freya’s parents, despite its sensitivity, despite the many questions it would spark. So do it, she chided herself. Stop procrastinating.
She closed the sketchbook and then guiltily, without quite knowing why, opened Zeb’s other drawer to peek inside. With a twinge of sorrow she noted its bareness: just a few folded T-shirts, a Sherlock Holmes book (since when was Zeb a fan?), and his keys to this house, which he’d obviously decided he didn’t need. She moved on to his wardrobe, in denial about the fact that she was now actively snooping, and half smiled at the skateboard propped up in a corner, a summer-long fad from a few years ago. In his bedside cabinet, the box of artists’ charcoal she’d bought him last Christmas also made her pause. Emma touched the slim pencils, the thicker charcoal sticks, the solid blocks. Then she noticed something down the side of the box: a long, glossy rectangle of white.
As she plucked it out and turned it over, she already knew what it would be. Zeb and Freya grinned up at her from a strip of photos just like the one Steph had brought round that morning. Four times over, laughing with heads together. In one picture Freya was tipping a vodka bottle into her mouth, looking more like a hard-core socialite than a blossoming sports star.
So Zeb had a memento of their meeting too.
Emma tried to convince herself it wasn’t hidden. It was just in his bedside cabinet. There was nothing wrong with that. Her pulse was rapid as she put it back and left the room.
Her nerves only grew as she rapped on the Harlows’ door. She’d rarely ventured up these stairs in the past and she wished now that she’d done so more often, for pleasant neighborly reasons. Maybe then this wouldn’t feel so daunting. Their door was painted a smart, clean ivory.
Her heart sank when Paul answered. She’d really hoped to talk to Steph alone. He looked exhausted, but still so unreadable, even as Emma blurted, “I’ve spoken to Zeb about Freya.”
He led her wordlessly inside. She’d been right in thinking their flat was much bigger than hers. They went through to a large living room and Emma was diverted by the feeling of space and light, the expanse of varnished floorboards, the lampshades hovering above, like satellites.
The brightness seemed to fade, however, as she took in the people sitting around the room. Steph was hunched in a chair beside the window, almost a mirror image of the one Emma had pulled close to her own window a floor below. The family liaison officer, George, was distributing cups of tea while the woman she presumed to be Paul’s mum fussed with coasters on the coffee table. The gray-haired version of Paul sat clutching a wad of paper and a pen, staring into space. The atmosphere was hushed but expectant, like the morning of a funeral.
“Emma’s here,” Paul announced, and all the heads pivoted, their anxious anticipation suddenly centered on her.
Steph stood up. “Have you spoken to your son?”
Emma nodded. Her heart was hammering again. She wasn’t sure she could say the thing she needed to in front of all these people. George looked as though he was going to speak, but the woman with the round glasses cut across him. “What does he know about our Freya?”
Emma had mentally rehearsed how she was going to summarize her conversation with Zeb, but now her thoughts scrambled. She didn’t know who to look at, so she focused on a print on the wall: the swirls of Van Gogh’s The Starry Night. Her gaze was compelled toward the photo of Freya beside it. She looked sunlit and happy, her smile unguarded. It was hard to imagine her necking vodka, hard to comprehend secrets or problems that might have led her away from this clean, comfortable home. Especially not the one she’d shared with Zeb, now trapped in Emma’s throat.
“He . . . he and Freya bumped into each other one night in the park. They got talking, had a drink together, nothing—” She stopped herself from saying nothing untoward, not wanting to plant ideas. “Nothing major.”
“When was this?” Steph asked.
“About two months ago, a Friday night. Freya was supposed to be staying at a friend’s but apparently she hadn’t felt like going. Zeb said she was . . . upset.”
“Upset? Why?”
Emma shuffled her feet. “Well, Zeb said that it . . . it was related to something she’d found out”—she motioned toward Steph, then broadened the gesture to encompass Paul as well—“about her parents.”
There was a shocked silence. Steph stared toward Paul but he was looking down, pressing his temples, seeming to sway back onto his heels.
“What do you mean?” Steph’s tone was sharp but breathy.
Paul stepped toward Emma. “Freya found out something about one of us?”
“Yes.”
“What?”
“I . . . don’t know.” As the lie came out, Emma pinched the edges of her cord dress. She just wanted to get out of there now. Compose herself, come back later. She could listen for when Steph seemed to be by herself, and tell her privately, let her absorb it first. “Maybe I should talk to him again.”
“He’ll need to make a statement,” George said.
“Okay.” Emma edged toward the door. She felt as if they were all crowding in on her but in fact they were stationary in their positions, watching her inch away.
When she was almost there, Steph’s voice stalled her. “Both parents?” She was fiddling with the zip below her chin, moving it a centimeter up, a centimeter down, small scratchy noises. “Which parent did Freya mean?”
Emma tried to signal to her that she’d return. “I don’t know,” she said again. Her stomach tipped as she wondered if this counted as withholding information. The awkwardness of the situation rolled itself in with her unease about Zeb, about glimpsing Robin, about coming across another strip of photos in her son’s drawer.
How could she stand in front of this audience and reveal something that might pull the Harlows apart?