The car was gone. Laura lay in the road with her legs twisted around at a strange angle. As she sank to her knees at her child’s side, Janine saw a slow trickle of blood dripping from the back of Laura’s helmet onto the slick, wet tarmac. She reached into her pocket for her phone and found that it was not there and she started to scream and scream, but no one came, because the next house along was half a mile away.
The police wanted to know what she had seen and heard—was she sure she didn’t glimpse anything of the car, perhaps a blur of color? Janine shook her head. “This was my fault. It was my fault.”
“It is not your fault, Mrs. Kilbride; this is the fault of the driver of the car that hit Laura,” the policewoman said to her. The policewoman put her arm around Janine’s shoulders and squeezed her. “We’ll find him. Or her. We’ll find whoever did this. Don’t you worry, they’re not going to get away with this.” Janine pulled away from her, gazed at her in pale, wordless terror.
They did find him. CCTV half a mile away captured two cars going past within minutes of Laura’s accident: the first belonged to an elderly woman whose car was found to be immaculate, without any sign of a collision. The second belonged to Richard Blake, an art and antiques dealer who lived a few miles away in Petworth and whose car, he said when the police tracked him down at work, had been stolen the night before. He had not reported it. As the police officers were leaving, Richard asked in a strangled voice, “Is she going to be all right?” and the policewoman asked, “Is who going to be all right?”
“The little girl!” he blurted out, wringing his hands in front of him.
“I mentioned a child, Mr. Blake. I didn’t say she was female. How did you know the victim was a girl?”
A criminal mastermind Richard Blake was not.
* * *
That’s how it happened. That’s what Laura believed. That’s what she was told, so—she was ten years old, remember?—that’s what she believed.
At first, of course, she didn’t believe anything at all, because she was in a coma. Twelve days unconscious, and then when finally she woke, it was to a new world, one in which she had a broken pelvis and a compound-fractured femur and a smashed skull, a world in which, it seemed, someone had done a full factory reset, sent her all the way back to zero. She had to learn to speak again, to read, to walk, to count to ten.
She’d no memory of the accident, or of the months preceding it—the new school, the new house, her new bicycle: it was all gone. She had a vague memory of their old house in London, of the next-door neighbor’s cat. After that, everything went blurry.
Gradually, though, as time passed, things began to come back to her. A few weeks before she left the hospital, she said to her father: “The house we live in now, it’s at the foot of a hill. Is that right?”
“That’s right!” He smiled at her. “Good girl. Do you remember anything else?”
“Bungalow,” she said, and he nodded. She frowned. “The car. It’s green.”
Her father shook his head, a rueful smile on his lips. “Red, I’m afraid, chicken. I’ve got a red Volvo.”
“No, not our car. The car that hit me. It was green. It turned out of our driveway,” she said. “It was leaving our house, just as I was coming home.”
The smile slid from her father’s face. “You don’t remember the accident, chicken. You couldn’t possibly remember the accident.”
A few days after that, when her mother came to visit （they never visited together any longer, which seemed odd）， Laura asked about the car that had hit her. “It was green, wasn’t it?” she asked. “I’m sure it was green.”
Her mother busied herself with tidying the get-well cards on the windowsill. “You know, I’m not sure. I didn’t actually see the car.”
Liar.
* * *
Janine, Laura’s mother, stood in the driveway in front of the house, shivering, wearing Ugg boots and wrapped in a bathrobe of chartreuse silk. Her skin was flushed with sex. They’d lost track of time; they were still entangled with each other when she looked over at her husband’s watch on her bedside and said, “Shit, Laura’s going to be home soon.”
Richard had dressed in a hurry, he almost fell over putting his trousers on, the pair of them were laughing, making plans for next time. She saw him out and kissed him as he got into his car. He told her he loved her. She stood on the driveway, her head tilted back, watching the snow come falling down, opening her mouth so she could feel the flakes on her tongue. His words echoed in her head and then she heard it and she knew: something terrible had happened to Richard.