‘Huh?’ Pip said, taken aback, until she followed her mum’s eyes to the laptop screen. ‘Oh, it’s called lividity. It’s what happens to the blood when you die. It pools on the… Do you really want to know?’
‘Not really, sweetie, I was feigning interest.’
‘Thought so.’
Her mum turned towards the door, hair foil crinkling. She paused at the threshold. ‘Josh is walking in today; Sam and his mum will be here any minute to collect him. How about when he’s gone, I make a nice big breakfast for the two of us?’ She smiled hopefully. ‘Pancakes or something?’
Pip’s mouth felt dry, her tongue like an overgrown aberration sticking to the roof of her mouth. She used to love her mum’s pancakes; thick and so syrupy they might just glue your mouth together. Right now, the thought of them made her feel a little sick, but she fixed a matching smile on to her face. ‘That would be nice. Thanks, Mum.’
‘Perfect.’ Her mum’s eyes crinkled, glittering as her smile stretched into them. A smile too wide.
Pip’s gut twisted with guilt; this was all her fault. Her family forced into a performance, trying twice as hard with her because she could barely try at all.
‘It’ll be about an hour, then.’ Pip’s mum gestured to her hair. ‘And don’t expect to see your haggard mother at breakfast – instead there will be a newly blonded bombshell.’
‘Can’t wait,’ Pip said, trying. ‘I hope the bombshell’s coffee is slightly less weak than my haggard mother’s.’
Her mum rolled her eyes and wandered out of the room, muttering under her breath about Pip and her dad and their strong coffee which tastes like shi— ‘I heard that!’ Josh’s voice sailed through the house.
Pip sniffed, running her fingers around the padded cushions of the headphones cradling her neck. She traced her finger up the smooth plastic of the headband, to the part where the texture changed: the roughened, bumpy sticker wrapped around its width. It was an A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder sticker, with the logo from her podcast. Ravi had had them made as a present when she released the final episode of season two, the hardest one to record yet. The story of what happened inside that old abandoned farmhouse, now burned to the ground, a trail of blood through the grass that they’d had to hose away.
So sad, commenters would say.
Don’t know why she sounds upset, said others. She asked for this.
Pip had told the story, but she never really told the heart of it: that it had broken her.
She pulled the headphones back over her ears and blocked out the world. No sound, only the fizzing inside her own head. She closed her eyes too, and pretended there was no past, no future. It was just this: absence. It was a comfort, floating there free and untethered, but her mind was never quiet for long.
And neither were the headphones. A high-pitched ping sounded in her ears. Pip flipped over her phone to check the notification. An email had come through the form on her website. That same message again: who will look for you when you’re the one who disappears? From [email protected]. A different email address again, but the same exact message. Pip had been getting them on and off for months now, along with the other colourful comments from trolls. At least it was more poetic and reflective than the straight-cut rape threats.
Who will look for you when you’re the one who disappears?
Pip stalled, her eyes lingering on the question. In all this time, she’d never thought to answer it.
Who would look for her? She’d like to think Ravi would. Her parents. Cara Ward, and Naomi. Connor and Jamie Reynolds. Nat da Silva. DI Hawkins? It was his job after all. Maybe they would, but maybe no one should.
Stop it, she told herself, blocking the way to that dark and dangerous place. Maybe another pill now might help? She glanced at the second drawer down, where the pills lived, beside the burner phones under the false bottom. But, no, she already felt a little tired, unsteady. And they were for sleep, they were just for sleep.
Besides, she had a plan. Pip Fitz-Amobi always had a plan, whether hastily thrown together or spun slowly and agonizingly. This had been the latter.
This person, this version of who she was, it was only temporary. Because she had a plan to fix herself. To get her normal life back. And she was working on it right now.
The first painful task had been to look inside herself, to trace the fault lines and find the cause, the why. And when she worked it out, she realized just how obvious it had been all along. It was everything she had done this last year. All of it. The two intertwined cases that had become her life, her meaning. And they had both been off, somehow. Wrong. Twisted. They weren’t clean, they weren’t clear. There had been too much grey area, too much ambiguity, and all meaning had become muddied and lost.