He howls for me. He’s close. Still running, I look over my shoulder. Face twisted in fury, he bears down. If he gets his hands on me, he won’t stop. Panic takes flight in my chest like a murder of crows. Then the ground vanishes beneath me and I am falling, tumbling down, down, down.
Sky becomes earth and earth becomes sky. There’s a sharp pain in my skull and, finally, I am still. Everything is blurry and slow. I blink up at the light filtering through the canopy even as black roses bloom across my vision. Warm wetness pools at my temple. Jack is high above me, clutching a tree on top of the bank. He is shouting – I see the angry red of his open mouth – but I am too far under water to hear him.
As he skids down the slope towards me, a final black rose blossoms, and everything sinks into darkness.
Chapter Thirty-Two
35 Days Missing
Adaline Archer
Dad was arrested. That’s right, sis, arrested. I keep replaying the moment he was handcuffed. I just stood on the street thinking I must be in some bizarre reality TV show because this couldn’t possibly be happening.
It started with another solo fishing trip which Dad insisted on leaving for in the early hours. There was a storm last night and it was still wet and windy today, so I was surprised he didn’t reschedule. But our parents do look for any excuse to avoid one another these days. With Dad taking off on more fishing weekends and Mum spending more nights in my guest room, they aren’t in one another’s company very often. I’ve tried inviting them over for dinner but they’re like the north side of two magnets; they just can’t seem to come together. You hear of it a lot though, don’t you? When a couple loses their child, it can split a marriage. I see how our parents struggle every day you are gone, and I wonder if Mum still believes it will be a tragedy if I never have children. Because, if I’m never a mother, I will never suffer the loss or disappearance of a child I’ve raised. That, at least, is a blessing. It’s hard enough losing a sister. Sometimes, I want to ask Mum, if she could erase the memory of you to ease the pain, would she? I think I would.
Anyway, with Dad out of town, it was up to me to drive Mum to the train station this afternoon. She’d planned a visit to her friends in Kent for a few days. At first, I didn’t think it was a good idea, Mum leaving in the middle of all this, but then I looked at her tired, thin face and knew she needed a break.
‘Phone me when you get there,’ I told her on the platform.
‘Don’t you worry about me, love. Trish will take good care of me,’ she said. ‘You just look after your dad, okay?’
At home, I was greeted with a familiar noise: the burr of the hoover. Strange since it wasn’t in my hand. I stepped into the lounge to see the rarest of sights: my husband in his relaxed weekend garb, enthusiastically hoovering with his wireless headphones on, singing an off-key rendition of ‘Wild Thing’ by The Troggs, and I felt a squeeze of affection for him.
Sensing my presence, he looked over and his face split into a smile to match my own. He turned off the hoover and removed his headphones. ‘Hello, gorgeous.’
Gorgeous. He called me gorgeous when we started dating. As soon as we married though, I became ‘darling’， which I’m sure he saw as an upgrade because that’s what his father calls his mother, but it makes me feel middle-aged. ‘Who’s the murder victim?’
He frowned. ‘What?’
‘You’re cleaning, which means you’ve either had a stroke or you’re covering up a crime.’
‘Oh har-har,’ he said. ‘I know you’ve been under a lot of stress recently, so I thought I’d help out.’ He brandished the hoover nozzle. ‘Do some cleaning.’
‘I like it.’
‘Yeah?’
I sashayed over to him. ‘Nothing gets me wetter than a man with a hoover in his hand.’
‘Oh really?’ He raised his eyebrows. ‘Well then, you should see what I can do with a mop.’
He wound an arm around my waist and pulled me to him, ‘Wild Thing’ still playing through the discarded headphones on the coffee table. He kissed me. I know you’d roll your eyes and say something like, ‘Running the hoover round once in a blue moon doesn’t mean you owe your husband a quickie on the sofa,’ but this was Ethan really trying. So I let him fuck me over the arm of our custom-made sofa, and when he’d all but skipped upstairs for a shower, cleaning forgotten, I picked up the hoover and finished the lounge.
‘What’s this?’ The voice at my back was so gravelly, it took me a moment to realise it belonged to Ethan.