‘He’s in the living room, he’s fine.’ Jen moves across the tiny bathroom to Kelly. He stays where he is, on the toilet lid, but Jen moves in alongside him, putting her hand across his back and guiding him towards her. To her surprise, he lets her, his arm coming around the back of her legs, his head resting against her chest.
‘It’s okay,’ she says gently to him, the way she would to Todd. ‘It’s okay to be upset.’
‘It’s just this –’
‘Your Christmas cold, I know,’ Jen says, letting him live the lie, whatever it is. Letting him believe it. Something he said to her in 2022 comes to her, about a divorcing couple. Avoiding pain is priceless to some.
After a few minutes, Kelly releases her. He looks across at Jen as she leaves to go and check on Todd and says one single sentence to her: ‘I just miss her – my mum.’ It seems to cost him a lot; his body convulses as he says it.
Jen nods quickly. And there it is. Something her husband – for some reason – has not ever been able to show her.
‘I know,’ she says. And she does know, motherless herself. ‘Thank you for telling me,’ she says.
Kelly gives her a watery smile, his black hair everywhere. His eyes look especially blue. And, here, back in the past, something passes between them. Something more substantial than what has gone before. Something Jen can’t even name, but something which goes some way towards igniting some hope within her that Kelly isn’t what he appears to be. Please let that be so.
Jen walks back to Todd in the living room. It is old-fashioned. Green, worn carpet, dark-wood furniture. It has a specific smell to it. A comforting, homely sort of smell: cinnamon sugar, cookies, a blown-out candle somewhere. Jen guesses that, somewhere or other, an alternative version of her was baking last night. Funny how those things felt so important then. Go and see the Christmas lights, bake and assemble the gingerbread house. And – poof. They disappear into history, causing only stress and leaving no imprint, like a footstep on sand that gets washed away too swiftly. Her entire life, she’s been so concerned with how things seem to be. Keeping up appearances. Having it all, the house with the carved pumpkin so everybody knew they’d done it. And yet. What was it all for?
Todd plays with his cars for a few minutes, then toddles over to the other side of the room.
‘No, Toddy, not that,’ she says as he dives suddenly into the bin. He ignores her, pulling out two balls of tin foil from what was perhaps a KitKat. Jen is disappointed that irritation flares up so easily on just a single day with him.
‘Mine,’ Todd says. His hurt little eyes gaze at her across the room. ‘More,’ he adds. He turns to the bin again.
He’s practically upside down, his head at the bottom of the bin, his feet almost rising off the floor.
‘Sorry, Todd, come here,’ she says. ‘Come to Mummy.’
Todd turns to her the second he hears the very first syllable fall from her lips, like a flower to his sun, and looks at her. And suddenly, just like that, like a light going on, she knows. She knows deep in her stomach, deep inside her.
She knows because of the way his eyes catch the early-morning blue winter light.
It isn’t her fault.
It isn’t his fault.
She knows that she mothered him well enough. She knows because of his eyes. They are lit with love. They are lit with love for her. She deflates right there on the sofa.
She tried her best. And, even when she didn’t, the guilt is as much evidence as anything else: she wanted to do her best for him, her baby boy.
The hindsight paradox that this very person here teaches her about in a decade’s time: she thought she knew it would happen, self-blamed. Thought he’d killed because of a poor relationship with her. But he doesn’t. It was an illusion. And so this is the moment, the moment Jen realizes that it isn’t about this. It’s not about Todd’s childhood, at all.
‘Come here, Toddy,’ she says. Immediately, he drops the balls of foil from the bin, and he comes to her, his mother.
Ryan
Ryan is finally about to meet him, the man in charge of the operation. The big guy. He will have hundreds of foot soldiers, of associates, multiple ops. The car thefts, the drugs, the stolen baby – they’re only a tiny part of it.
Ryan doesn’t know how the houses he targets are always empty, and he doesn’t yet know where baby Eve has gone, but he’s working it all out: and look. Here, walking in the cold to a warehouse in Birkenhead, he’s infiltrated all the way to the top.
Angela and Ryan have been instructed by Ezra to meet him here, eight o’clock at night. After you meet the boss, you get given better jobs, more important jobs. And, crucially, better intel. Ryan’s gone in wired, for the first time, on a wing and a prayer that the big boss won’t check him over. Leo says he won’t, says you don’t meet the boss without trust. ‘If he even intimates it,’ Leo said last night on the phone, ‘you act so fucking offended he’s quaking.’
‘Too right,’ Ryan had said. Not the sort of sentence he would usually say. Sometimes, he feels like he is becoming the person he is pretending to be. Darker, more volatile.
Ryan and Angela walk in silence for a few minutes more, watching cars being loaded and unloaded on to ships, people coming and going. As they near the warehouse, their body language changes. Angela becomes Nicola, Ryan watches it happen; her walk becomes a swagger, her mannerisms change.
Ryan doesn’t know how his own body language changes, only that it does.
The warehouse has no sign up above it. It’s closed down, the perfect place for these sorts of dealings. Ryan hopes it has good acoustics for the team who are listening in, gathering evidence with which to incriminate.
Ryan knocks twice on the dark green roller-shuttered door, as directed, then waits. Angela is trembling. She isn’t as together as she first appears. Ryan thinks she is just as shit scared as he is. Of course, it has occurred to him that this could be it: a sting. They could be rumbled. They could be done for. Somehow, Ryan doesn’t care. And, when he feels he does, he thinks of her, baby Eve, lost and alone, not at sea, but as good as.
‘In,’ says a voice from around the side. Ryan and Angela move around the edge of the building and find a door, propped open, allowing the outside security light to illuminate a shaft of the warehouse.
It’s otherwise empty, rows and rows and rows of floor-to-ceiling shelving, containing nothing. In the expanse of the huge room stands a tall man, younger than Ryan expected. He isn’t moving at all, just standing, arms folded, wearing all black clothes. He has dark hair and a goatee.
‘The two musketeers,’ he says. He tosses the end of a cigarette which embers at his feet for a few seconds before fizzling to nothing. ‘Got a job for you – need you to collect a list of empty properties. Going to send you an address now.’
Almost instantaneously, Ryan’s burner phone beeps with a single line of text from – yes! – an actual number. It’s an address on a high street in Liverpool.
This is it. This man in charge of it all is going to trust them with how he gets his intel about which cars to steal.
‘You await further instructions,’ he says to them.