Mrs Allard. The governess. Erin looked at the woman over Florence's head. The woman had sunk back into the armchair, her face grey, her hands trembling, her reading glasses askew. She looked like a woman who had known this moment was coming and had not been able to prevent it.
"Are you hurt?" Erin held Florence at arm's length, examining her face, her arms, her hands. Searching for bruises, cuts, anything. "Did anyone hurt you?"
Florence shook her head. Her eyes were red and her cheeks were wet but her face was whole and her body was intact and she was looking at Erin with those blue eyes, Alexandra's eyes, wide and trusting and so beautiful that Erin's vision blurred. "No. Mrs Allard was nice. She read me stories and she let me have biscuits and she let me haveCharlotte's WebandThe Secret Garden. But I wanted to come home. I kept asking but she said I couldn't. Not yet. She said it was like a holiday but it didn't feel like a holiday because there was no Percy and no Audrey and no Frank and Matilda and no you and no Mummy Alex." Her voice wobbled on the last words and fresh tears spilled down her cheeks and Erin wiped them away with her thumb, gently, the way she'd wiped tears from Florence's face a thousand times before: after scraped knees and bad dreams and arguments with Frank about whose turn it was on the swing.
"You're coming home now. Right now. And Percy is waiting for you. And Audrey. And everyone."
She pulled Florence back against her chest and stood up and the girl's weight was nothing, was everything, was the most important thing she had ever held. Eight years old and small for her age and light enough to carry for miles and Erin would have carried her across the entire county if that was what it took. She held her daughter against her shoulder and walked toward the broken door, past the governess who didn't move and didn't speak and whose face said she knew exactly what was coming for her, past the bookshelf and the sofa and the small stove with its dying embers, out through the splintered frame and into the night.
The moonlight fell on Florence's face. She blinked at the sky, at the stars, at the willows and the water and the dark shapeof the estate house in the distance. She'd been inside for six days. The night air on her skin made her shiver and Erin pulled her closer, wrapping her own jacket around Florence's small shoulders.
"Is Mummy Alex here?"
"She's close. She's waiting for you. I'm taking you to her right now."
Florence pressed her face back into Erin's neck. "I missed you. I missed everyone. I missed Audrey."
"Audrey misses you too. She's been moping around the castle looking for you. She'll be so happy when you come home."
She was walking back up the slope toward the main house, her daughter in her arms, her boots leaving dark tracks in the silver grass. The moon was high and the stars were sharp and the air was cold and Florence was warm against her chest, warm and breathing and alive and talking, asking about the dogs and the horses and whether Frank had been annoying, the ordinary, beautiful, mundane questions of a child who was returning to her life.
Erin was crying. Properly crying, for the first time since this had started, tears running down her face and into Florence's hair. She didn't try to stop them because they weren't grief anymore. They were something else entirely. Relief, maybe. Or gratitude. Or the simple, overwhelming joy of holding the thing you love most after being told you might never hold it again.
19
Three in the morning and the safe house was silent and Alexandra was sitting in the dark.
Julia had gone to sleep on the sofa in the second room an hour ago, her phone still in her hand, her reading glasses slipping down her nose. She'd stayed up until two, managing the stream of updates from Mills and Charlotte's office and the Home Secretary's private secretary, but exhaustion had won in the end and she'd curled up with a cushion beneath her head and fallen asleep mid-sentence. Alexandra had pulled a blanket over her and left her there, because Julia had earned it, because Julia had been holding everything together for a week and a woman could only hold for so long.
Now Alexandra sat alone. The living room lamp was off. The only light came from the kitchen, where the extractor fan's small LED cast a cold blue glow across the tiles. The curtains were closed but she could see the outline of the garden through the gap, the hedge a dark shape against a sky that was not quite black, the thin, pre-dawn grey that came at this hour in summer, when the night was already beginning to remember the day.
Her phone was on the arm of the sofa. Silent. The last message had been from Erin at twenty-three forty-two:Team entering grounds now. Will update when I can.That had been three hours ago. Three hours and eighteen minutes. Three hours and eighteen minutes of sitting in the dark and counting seconds and trying not to think about what silence meant.
Silence could mean the search was taking longer than expected. Thirty-two rooms, Erin had said. Plus outbuildings. That was a lot of rooms. A lot of doors to open, a lot of spaces to check, a lot of methodical, systematic work that took time even when the people doing it were trained.
Silence could mean they'd found something and were processing it and hadn't had a moment to call.
Silence could mean they'd found nothing, again, and Erin was standing in another stranger's garden in the dark, unable to bring herself to make the phone call that would end Alexandra's hope for the second time.
Silence could mean worse things. Things she would not name because naming them might conjure them into existence. Things that prowled at the edges of her mind like animals in a forest, visible only as shapes and movement, and she kept them there, in the periphery, because looking at them directly was not something she would survive.
She pressed her hands together in her lap. Her fingers were cold. The safe house heating had gone off at midnight and the air in the living room was cool and still and smelled of the cleaning products that MI5 apparently used to sanitise every surface. She thought about praying. She had not been a particularly religious woman since childhood. The Church of England faith she'd been raised in had become more tradition than conviction somewhere around university. But Matilda had prayed for Florence, had said it with the simple certainty of a child who believed that prayers were heard, and Alexandra wanted to believe that too.She wanted to believe that the universe was listening and that it cared and that her daughter was somewhere safe and warm and waiting to come home.
Please,she thought. It was not a prayer and it was not a plea. It was something between the two, a word offered into the silence of a dark room in a village in Surrey at three in the morning by a woman who had run out of everything except the ability to ask.Please let her be there. Please let Erin find her. Please let this be the end of it.
The house creaked around her. Old timber, old walls, settling in the cold. A car passed on the road outside, not stopping, just passing, its headlights sweeping across the curtains and then gone. She tracked it with her ears, the sound building and fading, and the silence that followed it was deeper than the silence before.
She thought about Florence's bed at the castle. The rabbit. The slippers. The cracked spine of her favourite book. She thought about the morning routine: Florence's careful precision, the shoes lined up, thethank you for todaywhispered into the dark. She thought about all the ordinary moments she'd taken for granted, the ones that filled a life so completely that you didn't notice them until they were gone, and she promised herself that if, when, Florence came home, she would notice every one of them. Every goodnight. Every breakfast. Every ride on Percy. Every argument between the triplets about whose turn it was to sit in the front seat. She would hold all of it, because she had learned what it meant to have it taken away.
She was still sitting like that, hands pressed together, eyes closed, the catalogue of ordinary moments running behind her eyelids like a film, when she heard the car.
Not the quiet approach of a car keeping a low profile. Not the measured pace of a security vehicle maintaining protocol. This was the sound of a car driving fast on gravel, the crunchand spray of stones under tyres that were not interested in stealth, the engine note rising as it turned into the drive and the headlights swinging across the living room curtains in a bright, moving arc that made the shadows jump.
Alexandra was on her feet before the car had stopped. She was at the window, pulling the curtain back, pressing her face to the glass, and in the glare of the headlights she saw the black Range Rover skidding to a halt on the gravel, and she saw the doors opening, and she saw Erin stepping out, and she saw what Erin was carrying.
A child. Small. Blonde hair tangled with sleep. Pyjamas. Arms wrapped around Erin's neck. Face pressed into Erin's shoulder. A child who was alive and whole and being carried across the gravel toward the house by a woman whose face, in the headlights, was streaked with tears and shining with something that Alexandra recognised because she'd seen it years ago, on their wedding day, when Erin had looked at her and the expression on her face had been so full and so fierce.
Alexandra ran.
