Dom laughs. ‘I see. So this onemessage, the only one I needed to send a minute ago, is now “a start”. Start of what? A long back-and-forth?’
‘Hopefully, yes. A chat. At some point you could say “Beth said she was in Hemingford Abbots the other day and saw a woman who looked exactly like Flora”, or something. You could ask after Georgina, say, “Hey, I was looking at your Instagram photos and there are loads of Thomas and Emily but none of Georgina—”’
‘Whoa, hold on … I’m not going to message a guy I haven’t seen for twelve years, and accuse him of discriminatory parenting. Look …’ Dom hauls himself into an upright position. ‘You want a definitive answer, I get that. But you’re never going to get one. There are loads of reasons – non-sinister ones – why Lewis might not put pictures of Flora and Georgina on Instagram.’
‘Such as?’
‘Maybe Georgina’s shy and doesn’t like having her photo taken, or doesn’t like the idea of pictures of her being online. Maybe Flora’s … I don’t know, a school teacher, and doesn’t want pictures of her private life online for her pupils to gawp at. Or it’s a coincidence that means nothing: Flora and Georgina happened to be somewhere else on the days Lewis took those photos.’
‘Flora, a school teacher?’
‘It’s possible, Beth. We haven’t seen them for twelve years.’
‘I saw Flora yesterday,’ I say quietly.
Dom looks at me hard. ‘I need coffee,’ he says.
Five minutes later we’re in the kitchen: Dom leaning against the counter, me sitting at the table waiting for whatever speech he’s about to deliver. I know him so well, and can feel him preparing to say something labelled in his mind as ‘difficult but necessary’.
Finally, he says, ‘You want me to contact Lewis in the hope that it’ll help to make sense of what you saw yesterday. I understand that, but … it won’t work, because there’s no sense to be made of it. Think about it. We’ve seen Thomas and Emily on Lewis’s Instagram, we know they’re teenagers, we know they’re in Delray Beach, Florida. Yes, they might divide their time between America and the UK, they might still own that house … but they can’t still be five and three, can they?’
‘No.’
Dom looks relieved. ‘Right – and that means you can’t have seen what you thought you saw. You might have seen another woman with two different children, but you didn’t see Flora Braid with Thomas and Emily twelve years younger than we know they are.’
‘So we’re going with the “I had a funny turn” theory?’
‘I mean … unless Flora and Lewis have had two more kids and were crazy enough to name them after their two oldest kids. Does that seem likely to you? It’d explain the strong resemblance, but … no.’
Five children: Thomas, Emily, Georgina, Thomas and Emily. No. That’s not the explanation. Lewis might be weird, but he’s not that weird.
‘Beth, there’s no point contacting Lewis Braid. Seriously. The only way he could give you the closure you want is if he says, “Oh, yeah, my kids exist in two different time streams. They’re simultaneously teenagers and toddlers”. Since we know he’s not going to say that, because it’s factually and scientifically impossible …’ Dom shrugs and takes a sip of his coffee. ‘I’ve got a better idea. We can sort this out without any help from Loony Lewis.’
‘How?’
‘By going back to Hemingford Abbots.’
‘What? Really?’ My mood lifts a little. The only thing I can’t face is the prospect of doing nothing at all, which was what I expected Dom to suggest: do nothing, forget about it, assume I imagined the whole thing.
‘Really,’ he says. ‘It’s Sunday, neither of us is working. Let’s do it, and draw a line under this today. My guess is, there’s a brunette woman who looks superficially like Flora living in that house, and she’s got two small kids. If you see them again, you’ll realise … what must have happened.’
‘I’m up for it if you are.’ Is it possible that, a few hours from now, I’ll be saying, ‘I can’t believe I was so certain that three complete strangers were Flora, Thomas and Emily’? If that happens, what should I do? Go to the doctor and get my brain tested? I’m not sure which is worse: seeing the impossible and being the only person who knows it’s real, or not being able to trust my own senses.
‘What about the kids? Our kids,’ I clarify.
Dom pulls his phone out of his dressing-gown pocket and starts tapping out a message. ‘Zan’s got her key. I’ll tell Ben to make sure she’s home before he comes back.’
While Dom has a shower, I go back to his computer, back to Facebook. Is it possible that the Braids aren’t on here at all, any of them? It seems they’re really not. Maybe they were until recently. I heard something on the radio a few weeks ago about people deleting their Facebook accounts because they objected to something or other that the company had done.
I go from Facebook back to Lewis’s Instagram to check he hasn’t posted anything new in the past few hours. He hasn’t. I go to his Twitter page: no new posts there either.
I notice something that I didn’t spot last night: a row of numbers underneath the company-birthday-celebration banner-photo. Lewis’s ‘Following’ number is 432. I click on it, not thinking it will work the way I want it to. Surely I won’t be allowed to see who Lewis is following if I’m not one of his Twitter friends or whatever it’s called.
Unbelievably, there seems to be no such restriction. The screen fills with names, and small pictures of smiling faces. My heart starts to pound. If any other Braid family members have Twitter accounts …
I scroll through as fast as I can. Grinning man, grinning man, cartoon character, business logo, business logo, woman in sunglasses, baseball team …
I force myself to slow down. I can’t afford to miss any account that might be Flora or one of the children.
