The traffic on the way back to Blossom Hill House is horrendous. Somewhere, there has been a terrible accident. We are diverted again and again. I glance at the clock. Mum will be home soon. We’ll never beat her back to the house.
Earlier, I let myself get so swept up in the excitement of a shopping trip with my sister, I didn’t think through the basics. Like, how to explain away bags of new clothes. But then, if Dad didn’t want her to have new things, why give her his credit card? I suppose they’d intended to escort her. It would have been a meticulously planned trip, not a spur of the moment race across the neighbouring field and a twenty-minute stumble through the woods. They’ll be furious we went without telling them. Which is ridiculous. We aren’t two naughty children disobeying curfew. We are grown women. Old enough to drink and drive and have a mortgage. Still, that childish terror of disappointing my parents weighs heavily on me. And, if I’m being fair to them, this situation is difficult to navigate – because though Olivia is an adult, she’s vulnerable too. Vulnerable to the media, vulnerable to her masked abductor, vulnerable to any stranger who may have recognised her. Maybe, though, if I can get back before Mum, and return Olivia safely, there will be less for our parents to be angry about.
I think about the man all in black. It was him. I’m sure it was. I glance at Olivia. She stares determinedly out of the window. Did she see him? And what about her wedding-dress comment?
Just like mine.
Is my sister married to her abductor?
My phone starts vibrating fiercely in the bag I’ve slung on the backseat. I don’t need to see the caller ID to know it’s Mum. I start groping for it, but Olivia, rising from her silent reverie, says, ‘Don’t answer. You’re driving. Isn’t it illegal to take a call when you’re driving?’
She’s right, but my heart still stutters anxiously in my chest. ‘If I don’t pick up, she’ll lose her mind.’
Olivia rolls her eyes and twists to retrieve my phone. Then she holds down the side button until the screen goes dark.
‘You turned it off?’ I ask, astonished. I don’t think I’ve ever turned off my phone when Mum calls, too afraid it will send her into a tailspin. Too afraid of Dad’s wrath for ignoring her. Too guilty for the part I played in the vanishing of their eldest.
‘You’re welcome,’ she deadpans, slipping my phone back into the bag and dropping it into the footwell.
There isn’t time to trek through the woods and race across the fields, so I tell Olivia I’ll park on the drive. But, just around the corner from the house, I pull over. This is my last opportunity to talk to her before we are surrounded by the media and then by our parents.
She’s frowning, sitting up straighter in her seat.
I take a deep breath and dive right in. ‘Are you married?’
She is stricken, as though my question is a knife across her palm. ‘You can’t tell anyone.’
My head is spinning – with confusion, with questions, with the sickening feeling that the police were right, and my sister chose to run away with her secret boyfriend. Which would mean the abduction was staged so I’d have a story to feed to our parents and anyone else who wondered about her. Is the person she married The Boy on the Bus? He gave her that diary. Maybe it detailed their relationship. Maybe that’s why they took it when they fled.
‘It isn’t what you think,’ she tells me. ‘That marriage wasn’t … legal. It isn’t registered or anything. It was just me and him and … and …’
I push my question out through shock-numbed lips. ‘That night … did you go with him willingly?’
‘No,’ she says firmly. ‘I would never have left you like that. I didn’t ever want to leave you.’
So whoever he was, he did abduct her, but that doesn’t necessarily mean he was a stranger. ‘Did you know him?’
‘No.’
‘But you married him?’
‘He wanted to do things properly. He wanted us to be married first.’
‘First?’ I ask.
Her cheeks colour.
Realisation crawls beneath my skin like a thousand skittering cockroaches. ‘How old?’
She swallows. ‘Sixteen.’
Bile rises, thick and fast, but I try to keep my expression blank. I don’t want her to confuse my disgust with this man for disgust with her.
She picks at the skin around her nails until it peels and bleeds. ‘I was never meant to tell you about the wedding. That was one of the conditions. That’s the rule. I promised not to tell. He’s going to be furious … He …’ She covers her face with her hands and digs her fingers into her skin until her knuckles turn white. Her breath is coming too hard, too fast, like the panting of a wounded animal.
I unbuckle my seatbelt and twist so I can face her. I shift as close as possible, the gearstick digging into my thigh. ‘Olivia,’ I say, forcing a note of calm into my voice. ‘Olivia, look at me.’
She does. I take her hand and press her palm against my chest, right above my heart. ‘Focus on my breathing,’ I tell her. ‘Copy it.’
I breathe slowly and deeply. In and out. My therapist did this with me whenever I had a panic attack during a particularly difficult session. I still remember the debilitating fear, the tight coiling of every muscle, the mantle of control I thought I had over my own body slipping completely out of reach as my thoughts came as fast as my panting breaths. After a couple of minutes, Olivia’s chest rises and falls in time with mine. I keep hold of her hand but gently lower it.
‘I’m sorry,’ she whispers.
‘You never need to apologise.’
Her long, dark eyelashes are wet with tears. ‘Can you keep it a secret?’
My pulse kicks. Being told a secret is like being asked to take care of someone’s baby: it’s a burden, but there’s satisfaction in being trusted with something so treasured. ‘I won’t tell our parents as long as you promise you’re confiding in the police. They have a much better chance of catching him if they have all the information. You do want him to go to prison, don’t you?’
She nods. ‘I’ve told them all of it. More than I’m comfortable with, honestly. The reason I keep details private from everyone else is because I don’t want to be pitied. I don’t want to be defined by the abduction, because it’s all they’ll see when they look at me.’
I understand why she feels that way. I’ve spent the last sixteen years trying not to only be the sister of that missing Arden girl. I don’t even use my real name at work so I agree to keep it a secret from Mum and Dad.
She gives me a small, relieved smile. ‘I missed you, Caitie.’
‘Missed you more.’
‘Impossible.’
I’m relieved that the crowd outside Blossom Hill House is much smaller. I suppose some of the journalists have left to cover the accident nearby. We get out of the car and rush for the front door. Reporters swarm around us. We are met with a symphony of clicking cameras and bellowed questions. They don’t even look human. They are bodies with Canons for heads. I keep one arm around my sister, tucking her close as we are swallowed up by them. Surrounded, all we can do is shuffle forward. I am shouting for them to please move but my voice is swept beneath the cacophony. Then there’s a break in the crowd as a police officer starts shoving desperate, groping reporters aside. There are hands on us. Guiding us. And finally, we are spat into the house and the door is slammed shut.
Immediately, Mum is there, wrenching Olivia from me and enveloping her. With palpable relief, Dad watches his wife take hold of their daughter. Then his gaze swings my way and the relief swiftly bleeds into fury. Always fury. ‘What were you thinking?’
‘Olivia needed some new clothes. We’ve only been gone a few hours.’
‘Without telling us? Without telling them?’ He throws a hand out towards the police officer who hovers awkwardly on the fringes of this melodrama. Someone should offer him a seat and a bucket of popcorn.
I glance at Olivia. She looks worried. I can’t tell whether it’s because I could renege on my promise or because I could tell our parents the excursion was her idea. ‘I’m sorry,’ I say to Dad. Beside me, Mum is gripping Olivia’s hand, examining her face as though she is an auctioneer, checking a priceless piece for damage. ‘She’s fine,’ I assure her. ‘We’re both fine.’
‘How could you be so irresponsible?’ spits my father.
Olivia opens her mouth to defend me, but I cut her off quickly. ‘I wasn’t thinking,’ I offer in a small voice. My sister’s brow creases and I shoot her a look to keep quiet. He has decided I am the troublemaker. He’s angry with me because he wants to be. Let him. What difference does it make now? He’s spent the last sixteen years being angry at me. One more day won’t hurt. ‘I insisted on a shopping trip. We went through the woods so we wouldn’t be seen. I thought we could get back before anyone noticed.’
‘Well, people noticed,’ he barks, thrusting his phone at me.
I take it. There is an online news article littered with photographs of us at lunch, browsing shops. I didn’t even notice anyone taking them. I feel violated. Never in my life have I been followed and photographed by strangers.
‘You claim to have seen her abductor lurking around Florence’s building, yet you thought it was safe to traipse through the woods alone? The same woods he dragged her through the night she was taken?’ He blows out a furious breath. ‘I’m not sure you even saw him at all.’
‘I did,’ I insist indignantly. For a moment, I consider telling him about the man dressed in black. The one I am sure was following Olivia in Bath. But it will only thrust me deeper into the scalding pan of my father’s rage.
‘Honestly, Caitlin.’ He sighs deeply, as though I am the human equivalent to a migraine. ‘This isn’t the right way to go about getting attention.’
There’s a pang of pain, like he’s just pressed the burning end of a fat cigar into my skin.
Mum looks away from Olivia long enough to register my hurt. She scowls at her husband. ‘Myles, that isn’t fair.’
‘She’s been acting up ever since we got Olivia back, you said so yourself.’
Her face drains of colour but she doesn’t deny it.
Betrayal spreads inside me like a dark moss. I’ve become used to my father’s contempt, but I never expected it from my mother. Growing up, my father made sure there wasn’t so much as a millimetre of space for me to put a foot wrong. I had to be the perfect daughter because he believed I’d robbed them of the one they had. I never wanted to add to their worries. So, while my friends went to parties and kissed boys and drank cheap vodka and broke curfew, I stayed at home. While they applied for their dream courses at dream universities, I took a degree I knew would please my mother at a university that was close by. And while friends travelled around Europe, enjoying their gap year, I applied for jobs in the local area. Even as I folded pieces of myself away, shrank myself and my ambitions until I fitted into the box they had built, my father viewed my efforts through a lens of disappointment. It was never enough. I was never enough. And I did it all so they could stand here and tell me I am attention-seeking and difficult, because for the first time in my life, I have disobeyed them.
Olivia opens her mouth again but I shake my head. It isn’t worth the breath. She doesn’t know that our father blames me for her abduction.
A month after she was taken, I overheard our parents talking.
‘We have a list of emergency numbers pinned to the fridge!’ snapped Dad. ‘How could Caitlin be so fucking stupid? So selfish?’
I was devastated he thought that of me.
‘She’s only ten years old, Myles,’ said Mum, soft and placating. ‘She was terrified.’
‘So was Olivia. She was terrified. She …’ He started sobbing. Great, gut-wrenching sobs. Because of me. Our poised, confident, unshakable father was coming undone because I had been stupid and selfish. And in that moment, I was sure the masked man had taken the wrong daughter. I wished he’d snatched me from our house instead. I think my father wished it, too.
The things I overheard that night have acted as a poison, slowly killing our relationship until we are left staring at the bones of what we had.
That memory and the fresh sting of my mother’s betrayal tips me over the edge. The walls of this house seem to close around me. I swallow my anger and my hurt, then turn on my heel and stalk out of the house.
No one comes after me.