They’re walking back from the pub lunch. The shared umbrella. Kelly has brushed his shoulder against hers several times.
‘We’re so late,’ she laughs.
‘I’m a bad influence.’
It’s quiet in the reception, only the noise of her computer whirring and, in the depths of the building, her father on the phone. ‘Tea?’ she says to Kelly.
He blinks, not expecting it, but nods anyway. ‘Sure.’
She disappears into the tiny kitchen off the reception, but this time she waits, watching him. And that’s when he does it: the thing she now knows he will do but that breaks her heart regardless. He slowly begins to root around on her desk. He’s good. His head bowed. Hands barely moving as his fingers sift gently. Unless you were looking at his hands, you’d never know.
Jen allows it to continue. Just watching, taking her time with the tea. He inches a drawer open and – God. All these years ago, he was doing just this. Her heart is pounding.
He pulls a piece of paper out of her drawer, then slides it back in again after he’s looked at it.
Her father emerges from his office just as Jen thinks she’s been far too long making the teas. He nods to Kelly and Jen stops herself joining them, just listens.
‘Thanks for the list earlier,’ Kelly says in a low voice to her father. ‘I wondered about this timeshare – this number here, is that an eight or a six?’
‘Ah,’ her father says, perfectly politely, unsurprised. He pats his suit uselessly, looking for his glasses. ‘A six.’
‘Okay – thanks,’ Kelly says. He is scanning the piece of paper.
Jen swallows. The timeshare conveyances her father pretended not to remember. Her father, facilitating organized crime. Her husband, investigating.
It was her father who was bad. The world seems to tilt and spin. Her father. A crooked lawyer.
And it was Kelly who was investigating him. All those questions on their first date. His intensity, part of their origin story, the way they fell in love.
Only it wasn’t.
‘What was that about?’ Jen has been to run some documents over to another law firm to cool down, to think things through. And now she’s back, and ready to ask her father while she can.
‘Nothing.’
‘No – what was on that paper you looked at? Was it addresses?’
Her father avoids her gaze. ‘Of unoccupied houses?’ she prompts.
‘It’s a small side project.’ His eyes shift to the side. But he’s no idiot. He can tell what’s coming, and he walks over to the window to close the blind, then brushes past her to close the door.
‘Of what? Selling data? To – criminals? Don’t lie,’ she says to him. ‘I’ll ask Kelly if you won’t tell me.’
Her father turns away from inspecting a filing cabinet and looks at her. ‘I …’ he starts to say. ‘I doubt Kelly would tell you,’ he says eventually.
Jen sits down in the chair in the corner of the room.
‘We couldn’t make rent,’ her father stammers. ‘I thought – it was just information. Like people who sell whiplash claims.’
‘But this isn’t whiplash claims.’
‘No.’
‘I thought you were as straight as they come.’
‘I was.’
‘But – until …’
‘Money, Jen.’ The force of this sentence makes him spin, just slightly, on the chair. ‘It was a bad decision. But, by the time you’re working with someone like that … you can’t extricate yourself. I regret it every day.’
‘So you should.’
Her father’s eyes flick towards her. This conversation is excruciating for him. Perhaps the strangest thing about travelling back through the past is the changes people themselves undergo. Kelly going from dark in 2022 to lightness and na?vety in 2003. Her father from openness to repression.
‘Do you remember before you started out here when we couldn’t meet the rent? We organized a longer payment window. You drafted the deed while you were at uni.’
Her first-ever contract. Of course she remembers. ‘Yeah.’
‘Well, after that, an old client came in. And – Jen, he made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. Passing those names and addresses kept us afloat for years. It paid for your LPC. It’s paying for your training.’
‘People being robbed.’
‘How did you find out?’
‘That doesn’t matter,’ she says.
She almost wishes she hadn’t found this out, she thinks, looking at her father, thinking about how she can never un-know it. But finding out that Kelly discovered this dark secret right in the centre of her family and never told her … it is a kindness. Kelly kept his identity, his transformation, secret from her.
Because he loves her. And because he walked into the law firm one day in 2003, fell head over heels in love with her and didn’t want to look back.
Day Minus Seven Thousand Two Hundred and Thirty, 08:00
Jen is back in the flat when she wakes. She blinks, looking at the sash window and the purple cushions below it. She flings an arm across her eyes.
She’s here.
She rolls over in her single bed. Still in the past.
He did it because he loved her.
He has been lying to her for twenty years.
What else was he supposed to do?
He isn’t who he says he is.
He gave up everything. For her.
He never told her her father was bent.
Why is she here? She pads out of her bedroom and into her kitchenette. It’s full of early-morning January sun. She hasn’t yet met Kelly. His number isn’t yet in her phone.
He’s undercover. Investigating her father. That’s why he never tells her.
That’s why he warns her, in the future, about looking into it.
That is why Joseph comes to the law firm, to find Kelly, to start things up again – and to notice which of his old associates may not be who they said. This is why Kelly says, in 2022, that she is in danger, that she should stop looking: Joseph assumed she knew what her father was doing. He said as much in the prison when they met.
She goes to the sash window that overlooks the crowded streets, already full of commuters in suits. Her husband-to-be is out there, somewhere, working as a police officer, yet to meet her.
She turns away from the sunlight. January the twelfth.
The date from the news story she saw after her shower.
Today is the day Eve goes missing.
Tonight is the night she is stolen.
Jen takes the bus to Merseyside Police in Birkenhead.
It’s so like Crosby police station from the outside. A sixties building. A revolving door lets her into a bright foyer. Bigger than Crosby, but still as tired, the same kind of chairs bolted to each other. She thinks about how they sat in them on that first night, all those weeks ago but years into the future, Kelly vibrating with fury.
She supposes it is easy to disappear. Quit the police, go travelling in a camper van with the woman you love. Re-settle out of Liverpool. Never travel. Get married using a fake passport that nobody ever checks. Thousands of people must do it, for reasons both more and less honourable than Kelly’s. Jen has never once in Crosby bumped into somebody she grew up with. She wonders if Kelly had any near misses. The world’s a big place.