Page 18 of Just Another Missing Person

Luckily, you took it in good spirits. You often do. It’s the part of you that other people don’t see, beneath the bashfulness, beneath the sometimes awkward demeanor.

“Oh, you know, to learn and grow,” you said lightly, only half joking. You laughed your quiet, understated laugh, leaned back against the kitchen counter, your arms folded across your chest, a mock interested expression on your face. Eyes blue, hair dark.

Therapy.

You blinked twice at me, two dark flutters of thoseeyelashes I have loved for two decades, waiting for a response. “No—no. Sorry, I think it’s good,” I said lamely. And did I? I suppose I did. What’s my coping mechanism, anyway? Working lots? Pissing around on Mumsnet? God, how parenting challenges you to look at yourself.

“Yeah?” you said, leaning your elbows on the kitchen counter. I bought that island myself—solid marble—the second year my business, Cooper’s, turned a profit.

“Of course. Just—you know...” I said, leaving the rest implied: be careful who you open our private lives up to.

“It’s therapy, not a cult,” you said. That smile again. I wished you would show it to other people. Never in the popular group at school, always coming home and telling me you’d eaten lunch alone. My heart used to ache with it, feeling fat and full, like a big, sad cloud in my chest.

And now here we are again, just like last week. Me waiting for you outside the therapist’s office. It’s nice, actually, to be here. Just lately, you’ve been out more. “With friends,” you said shortly, when I asked.

The office is at the back of Portishead High Street. The instructions to find it are complicated: past the artisan bakery, left, past the Waitrose, find the green door. You want me to drop you here each week, so I do. It’s been pure nostalgia, waiting for you. Toddler groups, football matches, school runs. They felt endless—not to mention annoying—until they faded away to nothing. And, in those days, I didn’t know how lucky I was. Parenting felt so much like drudgery. I’d race through the days like I was on a timer, waiting for that elusivefree time. For me, that was a single cigarette, smoked out in the garden after you were in bed, whatever the weather. I looked forward to it far more than I ever enjoyed it.

I’d go back inside afterward, and work. Scheduling aviewing here, calling for best and final offers there, but that’s all gone, too: Cooper’s sold last year. At least now at parties I don’t have to hear the estate agent jokes.

You lope out of the green door, past the Waitrose, etc., and flop into the car.

“How was it?” I ask.

“Yeah, good?” you say. “I think?” I don’t expect you to tell me any more than this, to be honest. You have been the same your entire life. Even as a baby: soulful, somehow private, emotionally contained. You are the sort of person who remembers an insult levied two years ago, but pretends not to.

“Learning and growing?” I joke, but really I’m pressing you. I’ve always been able to make you open up more than most.

“Of a fashion.” You lean back in your seat, a hand on the beard you grew after everything last year. It makes you look totally different. “It’s like...” You fiddle with the radio, I think for something to do. “Nice to have somebody who just listens—who doesn’t know anybody you’re talking about.”

“And whoareyou talking about?” I can’t help but ask curiously.

“Oh, my vast mummy issues,” you say, a side-eye to me.

“Ha, ha,” I say sarcastically, though it’s no laughing matter. Jesus. What if you’re serious? I put the car into drive, thinking how I once had a manual car with three gears that cost seventy quid. It’s funny to have once been a poor single mum, and then to have become a rich single mum, and now we’re sort of poor again, because of everything that happened last year, and me leaving the business. I want to ask if you told her this, and the rest, but I don’t. In a way, you know, it’s you and me against the world—always has been—and I don’t want you to let someone else in.

You hesitate, a hand to the radio dial again, then look directly at me. “I just feel—after everything. Well. I feel, like, good again,” you say. A swell of emotion crests over me, and I blink a couple of times. “Like we can—move on.”

“I’m glad,” I say, and I am. God, I think, looking at your profile, so unlike mine, but mine nevertheless to look at. How much I love you. You’ll never know it, either. You will only have some idea, if you have a child of your own one day, of the things you will do to protect them, of how deep and pure your love for them will feel, like, if somebody said, “Jump in front of this train, right now, to save them,” you would: you just would. No hesitation.

“Oh, can we get Thai?” you say, clicking your fingers as you think of it. “There’s that—remember? There’s that little place here we went once to—you had the sweetcorn chi–”

“Oh, but aren’t you learning and growing?” I say with a smile. “At the very least about takeaways?”

“This is absolutely therapist-recommended,” you say, and I laugh, and let a breath out, and keep on wondering if you spoke about last year in therapy: if you have told her yet.

8

Julia

Julia is plate-spinning. Doing things that are not the DCI’s job—like watching CCTV—and doing things she should do, too, like reviewing the sequence of events pieced together by ANPR reports, telecoms reports and CCTV reports. She’s been talking to the fingertip searchers, considering Olivia’s boyfriend (It’s weird how he sometimes is, Olivia had written in that email, perhaps about him?), and finding out exactly what the alleyway is ever used for.

And watching TikTok, too, while she makes coffee after coffee. Olivia’s story broke on the national news last night, and, as these things go, on TikTok shortly afterward. The theories are building: a helipad in the alleyway (unlikely), an SAS abseil rescue operation (nice) and, of course, a ghost. Julia had to give a statement to the press—fairly rare, and always makes her feel like she’s in an ITV drama. All the sound bites are the same. Very concerned for her welfare, doing everything we can, if anybody knows anything... Julia wishes she could say how she truly feels, while standing there, outside the police station, mic’d up.I don’t know where the fuck she is, I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing, I’m being forced to lie and cheat.

She’s also been looking up Matthew James. She can’t usethe PNC—it leaves a trail—so she is left with Facebook. There are three in Portishead: two are older, forty plus. The other is maybe nineteen, twenty. Dark hair, smooth olive skin. Julia stares and stares at him, there on Facebook. Holding a beer up, sun in his eyes. God, she hopes it isn’t him. He’s just a baby. Let it be one of the other two.

Jonathan arrives at the entrance to her office. “You look absolutely knackered,” he says. He is standing with his weight on one leg, absentmindedly running a finger around the metal of the doorknob.

“So do you.”

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