I scrabble to my feet and cross the kitchen. I’m about to pull the porch door closed when I spot the white padded envelope in the cage below the letterbox. I fish it out. My name and address are written in a fine cursive handwriting I haven’t seen in over twenty years.
‘Milly, quick!’ I grab her by the collar, yank open the front door and stumble across the driveway.
Ten minutes later we’re parked up by the Marina. It’s late and the seafront is empty and silent. The only sound is the rage of the black sea crashing against the pebbles over and over again. A streetlight casts an eerie glow into the car, turning the white parcel in my hands blood-orange red. I shouldn’t open it. I should take it straight to the police and tell them what I know about James Evans, but I can’t. I can’t risk this being some kind of sick joke, a kitchen implement, cuddly toy or something equally innocuous that would get me laughed right out of the station.
I fish a tissue out of the small pack in the glove compartment and cover my fingers with it then pick at the envelope’s seal. If James’s fingerprints are on it I don’t want to smudge them. It’s fiddly and takes forever for me to peel back the flap but I get the parcel open and peer inside. It’s too dark to make out the contents and I don’t want to reach inside so I manoeuver Milly onto the backseat and upend the package on the passenger seat.
Two exquisite baby’s booties tumble out. Knitted from the finest yarn in tiny delicate stitches, overlaid with lace and tied with ribbon around the ankle they’re exactly the kind of expensive, impractical footwear I coveted for Charlotte when she was a baby. I reach for one, overcome by memories and bring it closer to my face. I’m not sure what happens next – whether the smell of iron hits the back of my throat or the thick viscous liquid rolls down the side of my hand and curls around my forearm – but I scream and toss it away. It smacks against the windscreen and drops into the passenger seat footwell.
Even under the burnt amber glow of the streetlight I know that’s what it is, clinging to my fingers, smudged on the windscreen, soaked into the fine ivory wool of the booties. Blood.
A cold calm descends on me. James knows. He knows the secret I took with me twenty years ago. I can stop being afraid now. He knows. I can stop.
I reach for the card that’s lying beside the remaining bootie and wipe it with the tissue, smearing away the blood so I can read the message written on it in the same neat handwriting as the envelope.
‘Life shall go for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth’
DEUTERONOMY 19:21
I turn the card over,
A life for a coma? That doesn’t sound right.
We have some unfinished business, Charlotte and I.
The card falls from my fingers in slow motion, arcing backward and forward until it flutters to a stop by my foot.
I have to get to the hospital before James does.
Chapter 31
I run from the car park to the double doors at the entrance of the hospital but I don’t feel the wind on my face. I don’t hear the mechanical voice tell me the doors are opening as I step into the lift or smell the sharp sting of antiseptic as I squirt sanitiser onto my hands at the entrance to the ward. I don’t see, hear, feel, touch or taste anything. I am in limbo, I am running through a nightmare, chasing the spectre of my sleeping child. She hovers in front of me, so close my fingertips are millimeters away and then – gone – she darts away before I can touch her.
She will die unless I get to her. I know it with a certainty that runs deeper than bones, flesh or thought. I would stake my own life on it. Give my own life. James will not take her. He can have me. I will make him have me. I will give him no choice.
I can see the door of her room, further down the corridor. It is ajar, light spilling through the gap. Someone is in there with her. I run but now I’m wading through mud, each footstep sinking lower than the next and I move slower, slower.
I took James’s baby from him because I knew that I would never be able to escape if I gave birth to his child. And it wouldn’t have been a child – it would have been a leash around my neck, a choke collar to be jerked whenever he wanted to control me, whenever he needed to abuse me, whenever he had to punish me.
I was dry-eyed and resolute when I walked into the clinic. I took the tablet without a moment’s hesitation, lay down on the bed without a second thought and gripped my stomach stoically, silently when the cramps came. I didn’t even cry when blood trickled down my leg and I hurried to the toilet and felt life slip out of me and into the pan. But half an hour later, as I lay curled up on the bed and a nurse put a hand on my head and said, ‘You’re a strong one, aren’t you? You haven’t had so much as a paracetamol for the pain,’ I sobbed like the world was about to end.