It was ten p.m. when Paul finally limped toward home. His body felt broken, his mind lagging. He’d discharged himself from the hospital against medical advice, and Yvette had driven him to her place, lent him some of her partner’s clothes, then dropped him off, at his request, around the corner from his house.
Leaving him to try to come to terms with a new, almost incomprehensible truth.
Half of him still could not believe what Yvette had told him as she’d grasped his wrists in the hospital corridor a few hours before. The other half had to acknowledge that her revelation made sense of everything. Shadowed thoughts that had been knocking at the back of his brain for years had emerged into the light as she’d spoken. But that hadn’t made it any easier to take in.
She wanted to escape, Yvette had said. From Daniel, from his hold over her, from whatever he may or may not have done to Billie. And . . .
And from me, Paul had finished for her, still not fully comprehending.
Yvette had looked down. In a way, yes. She thought you’d try to follow her or track her down if you ever knew. She just wanted to disappear, and we thought we owed her that. A new life and some protection.
Breathlessness had swept across Paul’s chest as he’d begun to understand.
Nathalie hadn’t killed herself.
Nathalie was alive.
I wanted to tell you, Yvette had said. So many times, I almost did.
Paul had realized then what had been gnawing at him, almost subconsciously, for a long time. The fact that nobody ever went near Chainwell Woods anymore, not since what had happened to Billie, yet Glover had told him that Nathalie had been found hanging from a tree by a local dog-walker. It was a clichéd, lazy detail in the story. It had never sat quite right, but Paul hadn’t grasped why until now.
Glover knows? he’d asked Yvette.
She’d nodded. It suited him to get Nathalie out of the picture. One less person to expose the whole “scandal.” But I didn’t go along with it for his sake. It was for Nathalie . . . and you.
Me?
You had to let her go, Paul. I knew you never would as long as you thought she was somewhere out there.
The words echoed in his head now: somewhere out there.
And yet he didn’t know what to feel. Sadness? Relief? Fury? Deep inside, he knew that what Yvette had told him was huge. But he couldn’t bring his reaction to the surface alongside everything else. He just wanted to nuzzle his face into his wife’s hair, shut his eyes and open them to see Freya behind her, smiling and sleepy, in her polka-dot pajamas.
Imagine if he got home to find her there. If there was an explanation so simple he’d looked right past it. Looked in the wrong direction.
As he neared the house, he noticed Steph’s car wasn’t on the street. Two police cars were parked in its place. That wasn’t so unusual: Police had been there constantly over the last few days, but something about them suggested a flurry of activity. One had its doors open, leaking the buzz of a radio. An officer got out of the other and headed toward Paul.
“Mr. Harlow.” It was dark enough for him not to notice Paul’s injuries. Paul stood as upright as he could, braced. “There’s been an incident.”
Paul’s heart juddered. Would it be Freya? Before he could speak, the officer said: “An abusive note was pushed through your door.”
“Abusive? Saying what?”
“It’s been taken away for examination. But it said . . .” The man shone a light at his book and read awkwardly, without glancing up: “‘Mother of the year—question mark. Try liar of the decade. Innocent victim—question mark. Nobody but yourself to blame.’”
Paul labored to compute the words. Liar? Blame? Each one felt like a pendulum swinging hard in his skull.
Mother?
The officer cleared his throat. “Mrs. Harlow and your neighbor Miss Brighton chased a man—”
“Chased him? What? Are they okay?” He glanced to the left, where Steph’s car should have been, and felt the churn of alarm that had become a constant companion. “Where’s my wife?”
“We . . . don’t know.”
“What the hell do you mean?”
“Miss Brighton fell. An ambulance took her to hospital, and we arrived at the scene, but . . . Mrs. Harlow had gone.”
“Gone?”
“Somehow, among all the activity, she disappeared. Nobody’s answering the buzzer to your flat. Has she been in touch with you?”
Paul shook his head, cursing his smashed phone, his own distraction. The alarm was taking on a new color now. More sinister, bewildering. But awakening too. “Who was the man?”
“He fled, I’m afraid. We’re doing everything we can to track him down.”
Paul swore softly, turning toward his house. “I’ll check the flat.”
Letting himself in, he stopped and stared around him. There was a scattering of papers and photos on the floor of the shared hallway, a shiny red ball in one corner, a shoebox on its side. Paul crouched painfully to examine the items. Who were the people in these old photos? What was the significance of the newspaper clipping? Who had put these things here?
“Steph?” he shouted as he used the banister to haul himself upstairs. The flat was cold and still. His parents weren’t there either. He hollered Steph’s name again into the empty living space.
In their bedroom, he saw the wardrobe doors flung open, pairs of shoes and bundles of scarves scooped out from its bottom shelf. Paul stepped closer but still couldn’t make any sense of it.
What had happened while he’d been caught up yet again in the fallout from his past?
A drawer hung open in the kitchen. The drawer where they kept their knives. Paul’s heart kicked as he tried to work out whether any were missing. He was fairly sure their largest kitchen knife was absent. He checked the sink and the dishwasher, a chill taking hold when he failed to find it.
The memory of sinking a blade into Daniel’s shoulder turned him even colder. The idea of Steph doing anything like that was unimaginable, but perhaps she would have said the same about him before all this. Had she been tumbling through her own destructive series of events while he’d been miles away, diving headlong into his?