"I'll come when I can. I have to go."
The line went dead. Alexandra stared at the phone in her hand. The screen dimmed, then went dark, and her own face stared back at her from the black glass, pale, drawn, the face of a woman whose hope had just been surgically removed.
Frank said: "She's not there, is she?"
Alexandra looked at her son. His small face was set in an expression that was too old for eight, the fierce, comprehending gravity of a child who had absorbed enough adult conversations to understand the weight of a three-word phone call. Beside him, Matilda had gone very still. Her cards were held loosely in her lap and her eyes were dark and wide and fixed on Alexandra with an intensity that was painful to meet.
"Not yet, darling. But the team found important clues. They're still looking."
"Mummy Erin sounded angry."
"She is angry. She's angry because she wants to find Florence and she hasn't found her yet. But angry is good. It means she won't stop."
Frank processed this. His jaw tightened, a tiny, fierce gesture that was pure Erin, and he nodded once. "Good. I'd be angry too."
Matilda said nothing. She set her cards down on the floor, rose, and crossed the room to Alexandra. She climbed onto the sofa and pressed herself against Alexandra's side, and her small body was trembling finely, like a string that had been plucked. Alexandra wrapped her arm around her daughter and held on and felt the tremor pass through both of them, shared and absorbed and held.
Julia appeared in the doorway. Her phone was still in her hand but she wasn't looking at it. She was looking at Alexandra with the expression of a woman who had many years of experience managing royal crises and had never seen one that looked like this.
"I heard," Julia said quietly. "I've spoken to Helena. They're establishing a new command post at the property and MI5 is redirecting resources. Charlotte's office is prepared to issue an updated statement if needed."
"I want to go home," Alexandra said. The words came out raw and small and nothing like a Queen's voice. "I want to take the children home."
"I'll arrange it immediately.”
Vic was on her feet. She gathered the scattered cards from the floor and slipped them into her pocket and her face was tight with the controlled fury of a woman who had been sitting on the sidelines while someone she loved walked into a building that didn't hold what they needed. She crouched in front of Alexandra and took her hands.
"She'll find her, Alex. Erin doesn't lose. She's never lost at anything in her life and she's not going to start with this."
Alexandra wanted to believe it. She searched Vic's eyes for the certainty that her voice carried and she found it, fierce, absolute, the certainty of a woman who had known Erin for years now and had watched her refuse to be defeated by things that would have broken anyone else. She held onto it because it was all she had.
The cars pulled up outside. They piled in: Alexandra and Matilda in the back, Julia in the front, Vic with Frank and Hyzenthlay in the second car. The drive back was quiet. Matilda fell asleep against Alexandra's shoulder ten minutes in, her breathing slow and even, her body surrendering to the exhaustion that five days of crisis had accumulated. Alexandraheld her daughter and watched the morning pass through the window. The countryside was green and sun-dappled and indifferent to the catastrophe unfolding within it. Cows grazed in meadows. A farmer drove a tractor along a lane. A woman walked a dog beside a canal, the animal bounding ahead with the cheerful obliviousness of a creature that didn't know the world was wrong. Alexandra watched it all and she didn't see any of it. She saw Florence's sweater in Erin's hands. She saw the empty bed. She saw the curtains that had been drawn across a window where a child had stood and looked out at a world she couldn't reach.
The castle appeared on the horizon and there was nothing. No relief, no comfort, no sense of homecoming. It was just stone and glass and the flag still flying at half-mast, and Florence was not inside it.
They settled back in. Julia took charge of logistics: arranging meals, coordinating with the security team, managing the stream of calls from Charlotte's office and the media advisors and the Home Secretary's private secretary. Vic took the children to the kitchen and made them toast with honey and sat with them while they ate, her voice gentle and steady in a way that must have cost her enormously.
Alexandra went upstairs. The corridor was quiet, the stone floor cool beneath her feet, the afternoon light falling through the tall windows in pale rectangles. She walked to the triplets' bedroom and stood in the doorway and looked at Florence's bed. The rabbit with its flopped ears and button eyes. The slippers, toes pointing outward, waiting for feet that had been gone five days. The books on the nightstand:The Secret Gardenon top, the spine cracked at page sixty-seven.
She sat on Florence's bed. The duvet smelled of laundry detergent, not of Florence. It had been washed since Florence last slept here, five days ago, an entire geological age. She pickedup the stuffed rabbit and held it against her chest and pressed her face into its worn fur and the dam that she'd been holding since the phone call finally broke.
She cried. Silently, because the children were downstairs and the walls were not thick enough, but her body shook with it and the tears ran down her face and into the rabbit's fur and she cried with the wretched, desperate abandon of a mother who was running out of ways to believe that the world would give her child back.
Vic found her there. She must have come upstairs after the children finished eating. She stood in the doorway for a moment, then crossed the room and sat beside Alexandra on Florence's narrow bed and put her arm around her, and she didn't say anything. She didn't sayit will be okayorthey'll find heroryou have to stay strong.She just sat there, solid and warm and present, and held on.
"What if we don't find her?" Alexandra whispered.
"We will."
"But what if we don't? What if she's gone? What if they've taken her somewhere we can't reach and we never—" The words dissolved. She couldn't finish the sentence. Couldn't give voice to the shape of the fear because voicing it might make it real.
Vic's arm tightened. "Alex. Listen to me. Erin Kennedy has broken every rule and ignored every protocol to find your daughter. She walked into an armed operation with a bandaged hand and a badge she doesn't carry anymore. She's not going to stop. She is physically incapable of stopping."
"She wouldn't connect with me." The words came out quiet and raw. "On the phone. Her voice. She sounded closed. Like she was somewhere I couldn't reach. And when I asked her to come here she said she couldn't. She didn't say she'd come later. She said she had to go."
"That's Erin in operational mode. You know that."
"I know. But it's never been like this before. Even after the assassination attempt, even in the hospital, even when she was barely conscious, she reached for me. She always reaches for me first. And on that call she didn't. She sounded like she was miles away and not just physically." Alexandra pressed her face against the rabbit. "I'm losing Florence and I think I might be losing Erin too. Not to someone else. To this. To the guilt, to the fury, to whatever she's turning into to survive this. She's disappearing into the search and I'm afraid she won't come back out."
