Oscar is working in his study when I return home from the bar. I see the glow of his office lamp down the hall as I close the front door quietly behind me. As a freelance web designer he can set his own hours, and for the last few months he’s been working late into the night. It’s just after ten now and I really don’t want to go to bed alone. I’ll lie awake, counting down the hours to the anniversary. Suffocating beneath the memory of Olivia being taken as I hovered uselessly nearby. So I set down my bag and slip off my sandals, then I move barefoot to his door. It’s ajar. I peer inside, wondering when he’ll be done. He’s sitting at his desk, headphones on, his back to me, tapping away at his laptop. Every now and then, he glances at the thick binder of notes on the desk beside him.
I push open the door, but he doesn’t hear me. Brushing grief away like dust from a bookshelf, I paste on a smile and move up behind him. Then I lean over his shoulder, playfully covering his eyes with my hands. He yelps like a dog being kicked and leaps from his chair. I jump back, startled by the outburst. He rounds on me, arms raised, ready to fend off his attacker. A giggle rises and I clasp a hand over my mouth to squash it.
The fear in his eyes burns away. ‘Jesus Christ, Caitie,’ he breathes, removing his headphones.
‘Sorry,’ I say around my hand. ‘Didn’t mean to scare you. You’re working late.’
I move towards his laptop, curious about this new project he’s been pouring all of himself into, but he catches my wrist and pulls me to him. ‘I can stop now you’re back.’
I smile, relieved I won’t have to coax him up to bed.
‘How are you? How are you feeling?’ There is a sincerity in his voice that scares me. He doesn’t want a mundane and dishonest ‘fine’, like most people do when they ask. He genuinely wants to know. Tonight though, I don’t have the energy to unearth it all. I can’t answer with the rawest truth. Can’t admit that I feel enraged and guilty, that there’s a loneliness so thick and black, it blots out everything else; that this time of year I harbour an irrational and intense anger at all the people with sisters they can see and touch and talk to. So I offer him another, more easily digested truth. ‘I really, really miss my sister.’
He nods, folding me into him. I bury my head in the crook of his shoulder and breathe him in slowly: shampoo and cologne, citrus and wood, coffee and ink. I ground myself in this moment. In the reassuring pressure of his palms against my back, holding me to his chest. In the safety that comes with his thick, strong arms encircling my body. The heat of him. The hardness.
But then Olivia’s face flashes into my mind like a strike of lightning. Her wide, terrified eyes, caught in the eerie silver-blue glow of that night. Her finger pressed to her lips, warning me to stay silent. The horror that starts in the balls of my feet and rushes up through my body like engulfing flames.
‘Caitie, you’re shaking,’ he says. He tries to pull back, to study my face, but I cling to him. Citrus and wood. Safety and strong arms. Heat and hardness. It isn’t enough. I can still see her face. Can see that man in the mask with the long nose and furious brow, the blade in his hand tilted towards her throat.
Loneliness threatens to overwhelm me again, coming for me in an enormous barrelling wave. I run from it. I kiss Oscar with so much need, my hands slipping beneath his T-shirt and up his back. Then down, raking my nails across his skin. He groans lustfully into my mouth.
‘I want you,’ I say because sex is a place I can go where the dark glitter of her disappearance can’t follow. He lifts me easily. I wrap my legs around his waist and kiss him as he carries me upstairs to bed.
After, Oscar falls into a deep, satisfied sleep. I lie awake, my head on his chest, listening to the steady thump of his heart. When we met, I was twenty-one and fresh out of university. Where most of my friends were applying for graduate jobs, I was secretly planning a trip backpacking around Europe. I’d saved enough to travel for at least four months. I was afraid my parents would object so I kept it from them, too. Then I met Oscar at a cheese-and-wine night at the local farm shop. It wasn’t my kind of thing. As a student, my taste was limited to Malibu and Coke or cheap vodka, but it felt so sophisticated, so grown up to attend an event like that – and the tickets were free, emailed to me in a competition I hadn’t even entered. Oscar was helping his parents run it. Now he says meeting each other was fate.
He took an immediate interest. We ate good cheese and drank good Merlot. I liked that he didn’t look down on me when I admitted I knew nothing about wine, which, to people who do, is like confessing you’re illiterate. He was handsome, a mop of sandy hair, dark eyes and darker lashes, a taut, lean body. He was charismatic and interesting, but nervous, too. So nervous he spilled his drink on me. He apologised profusely and insisted on taking my number so he could pay for the dry cleaning. I gave it to him, though I’d never had anything dry cleaned in my life. The next day, he asked me on a date. We met at a bar. He was playful, educated, well-travelled. We talked about his adventures. Summers spent in Egypt, Peru; a placement year in Berlin. I told him of my secret plans for the autumn. He was excited for me. Offered to help plan my trip. I didn’t mean to fall in love with him. But that summer was a montage of picnics and quirky bars and great sex. Of wild-water swimming and candlelit dinners. Of balmy evening walks and barbecues. Talking to him was easy. It felt like I’d known him all my life. Though he was only vaguely aware of the famous Disappearance at Blossom Hill House. At the time Olivia went missing, she and Oscar were the same age, but his family didn’t move to Stonemill until a few months after she was taken. When I told him about my sister he was unwaveringly supportive. Interested without being morbid. He asked questions but didn’t push for answers. When I gave them, he listened intently, and could recall what I’d said in great detail. We grew close. Suddenly, the idea of losing him terrified me. I worried if I left to travel, things between us might fizzle out. That, and I was still too cowardly to tell my parents. So I took the easier option: I stayed. Five years on, Oscar and I are engaged. Every year we attend the annual cheese-and-wine night at his parents’ farm shop where we met. When fate brought us together.
My engagement ring is on the nightstand. I stare at it. I’ve always wanted to get married. When we were little, Olivia and I would play Weddings. We’d use the fluffy white bath towels as veils and sneak our mother’s white stilettos from her cupboard. We’d liberate flowers from the wild meadow for a colourful bouquet.
I love Oscar. I want to be his wife. Our families want it, too. With Olivia gone, mine is the only wedding either of their children will ever have. Mum is like a racing greyhound in her pen, waiting with barely contained patience for the gun to sound so she can set off. She is desperate to discuss table settings and floral arrangements, entertainment and canapés. To go dress shopping as mother and daughter. To buy the big hat. But who will my mother see as I step into the white gown? Me or Olivia? Will she shed a tear because she’s overjoyed that her youngest is getting married, or because her eldest never will? And how will I feel on that day as I walk down the aisle without my sister? Knowing she will never have a happily-ever-after. That she was stripped of it. Of everything. Because I didn’t save her the way she saved me.
‘I’m so sorry,’ I whisper into the dark.
In the early hours of the morning, I’m woken by my ringing phone. Oscar grunts and rolls onto his front. I intend to decline the call and go back to sleep until I see it’s my mother. She probably wants to know what time I’m coming over today. In the early years of Olivia’s disappearance, the entire town would gather on the anniversary. Journalists and television crews would come to record the event. Close-ups of my mother’s red eyes and thin face. Of my father’s set jaw and furrowed brow. Shots of flickering candles and bouquets of flowers. I hated the media. Hated the journalists that suggested my parents were involved. Hated the strangers with watery eyes who didn’t know my sister but wanted to sink their teeth into our mourning. Still, we got through it for Olivia. The more widely broadcast her story was, the more likely she was to be found. Of course, she never was. I was glad when the annual vigils petered out, replaced by a yearly, more intimate, gathering at my parents’ house.
The phone stops vibrating in my hand and I’m relieved. I’ll call her back. After coffee. I’m setting my phone down again when it rings for the second time. Only, it isn’t my mother. It’s my father. He never calls. Never. Pulse racing in trepidation, I sit up in bed and answer.
‘Caitlin,’ he says with so much authority. ‘You need to come to the house.’
I sag against the headboard. Of course, when I didn’t pick up Mum’s call right away, she asked Dad to phone. ‘I will. What time is everyone arriving?’
‘No. You need to come now. Right now.’ There’s a thick tremble to his voice. It makes ice drip down the back of my neck.
‘Dad …’ I say slowly, trying to calm my cantering thoughts. ‘What’s going on?’
Beside me, Oscar stirs.
‘Come to the house.’
‘Dad,’ I say sharply. So sharply, Oscar props himself on his elbows and mouths, ‘You OK?’
Silence. I picture Dad in the kitchen, staring out of the French doors, the frustration he holds only for me starting to blister again. But I don’t care. I need to know.
‘She’s back,’ he says.
My breath comes faster. ‘Back?’ I whisper. ‘Who’s back?’
‘Olivia.’