I realise I’ve been holding my breath.
I have got to put a stop this. It doesn’t matter what happened with my parents, my adoption: that’s past tense. This situation with Emma is my present, and I must deal with it as a functional adult would. I need to talk to her, properly, and soon.
And while I’m at it, I must stop reading into everything Sheila says. She’s met Emma twice; they have no contact beyond me, no friends in common. Sheila simply saw Emma in Waterloo Station, an unexpected place, and was being nosy.
I write back and tell her again there’s nothing to worry about – I really am just hot – and I go to get some water.
. . . And yet, I still can’t quite let go. As I cross the newsroom floor I think about Emma’s papers, which have not reappeared in the green shopping bag. I’ve searched the house for the university letter: gone. The letter about her father: gone. The note from Robbie x: gone. I started flicking through the skeleton paperwork that remains in her cupboard, but I had no idea what I was looking for; what she might have taken out. And the further I looked, the deeper I was pulled into the black song of the past, into my parents’ spare room that day.
We are Emma and Leo. We’re a good couple. A great couple. So great our friends find us annoying; we’re not that couple whose relationship is riddled with secrets.
Aren’t we?
I decide in that moment that I’m going to Glasgow, and I will speak to Robbie Rosen.
Knowledge is power, we tell ourselves, only that’s a lie, too. I’m already way out of my depth.
I pick up the phone and call Glasgow University. I bring up Easyjet to book a flight. I message my university friend Claire, who works at BBC Glasgow, and ask if she’s around for coffee on Thursday afternoon. She responds straight away: YES! Fantastic! Can you come to the BBC? I’ll sign you in!
Finally, I log into an email account I’ve had for years, from my hack days. It’s not my real name. I email Robbie Rosen and ask if he’s available on Thursday for a quick chat about Emma Bigelow, because she’s been ill recently and I’m writing up a stock obituary. Forty minutes later, he replies to say he can.
It’s as easy as that.
Chapter Seventeen
EMMA
Something in me breaks when Leo’s sad. I can’t rest until I’ve solved whatever the problem is; I stop at almost nothing. But of course, it never works; it just drives him mad. It’s probably the only time he loses his temper.
Thankfully, Leo is nothing like me. When I have a problem he trusts me to deal with it howsoever I see fit. He’s never once questioned my need to escape to Alnmouth when dark clouds gather – he calls these my Times, and knows to take a back foot. ‘Go and reset,’ he’ll say, kissing me, at King’s Cross station. ‘And remember, I love you.’
But his generosity only makes the guilt more acute. He has no idea what I’m risking, every time I come up here. He thinks I come only to heal.
Alnmouth, three and a half hours from London on the fast train, is where the dark curl of the river Aln empties into the North Sea. Dad and I came to this part of the coast every summer when we lived in Scotland. In my memory our holidays were ripe with everything I’d craved: laughter, spontaneity, the company of other human beings. I remember us rockpooling for hours with the family in the caravan next door, shared picnics on the edge of the dunes. Me laughing myself silly in the playground as light faded from the estuary and the wind whipped up the scrub grass on the saltmarshes. Golden times.
But there was nothing golden about my visit to this place four years ago. The wind was ferocious for the entire visit, rain flouncing in and out from the sea, and I couldn’t dry my clothes quickly enough. By the last day I was desperate to get back to London, and Leo.
That final morning was the one time I failed to make my checks. A fatal error. I went out to the beach, unthinking, with a plan to kill the last few hours crab-hunting on the exposed rocks beyond the golf course.