Page 55 of Just Another Missing Person

“Hang on,” I say. “Hang on.” But he doesn’t wait. He sets off, loping down the street, then turns to me. “Shedidtry to fuck up my life,” I shout.

He turns slowly, looking at me. And that’s when my mind presents the suggestion that he is both victimandcriminal, like a lot of people. He comes toward me, to shake my hand—the first of what will become many—in a greeting, in an acknowledgment, and in a pact.

“I’m Zac,” he says.

26

Lewis

The house is silent and quiet, sleeping. But, for the first time, now a year later, it doesn’t feel empty. It feels peaceful, like a cat by a fire. The rhythms of life have started coming back to me and Yolanda, so gradually you’d miss it, like a tide coming in. Yesterday I bought a bottle of wine and a sharing box of Maltesers. Such a small thing, but it means a lot: they resemble hope, to me. Not that you will return, but that there is life after you, instead.

I don’t turn the lights on as I get up, just look at the sunrise, the clouds scudding and beautiful, printed with the footprints of a thousand toddlers’ steps, the backdrop pearlescent. Nothing will be the same again, but that doesn’t mean there can’t be this: pockets of time when things are calm. Something has shifted. The tiniest pebble on a beach that moves and causes two more to shift and fall down, and then allows a trickle of water to seep into the sand. Grief that is the price I pay for having loved you so much.

I go out. Walking, walking, walking until my legs feel happy and wobbly and my heart feels full and strong. Sometimes, on the more optimistic days, I like to think about how alive I am. That your life was probably taken from you, butmine has not been, not completely, though it may feel like it has. The sky moves through its dawn, twilight in reverse. The light low and watery, slowly, slowly, slowly brightening up. I find my favorite rock.

Last year, after Zac’s death, his brother, David, and I met up twice, he angry, me jaded. Zac had told him about Julia, and then, when Zac died, David found my details in Zac’s phone and called me. He said if I ever needed any help to bring down Julia, or even just cause her misery, he’d help me. He, too, was a petty criminal, well connected. Able to do “all sorts,” he said, if I ever needed him.

Eventually, I told Yolanda that Julia had an enemy other than me, and she told me to drop it. We sat right here together, on this rock, our bottoms freezing and damp, and we talked about you. And we talked about us, too, and who we had become in your aftermath.

“I love her so much,” Yolanda said, “it’s like it has nowhere to go.”

“I know,” I said. “A volcano.”

Yolanda nodded, saying nothing more, knowing, I hope, that I understood.

“If she doesn’t...” Yolanda started to say, later, when the air was cooler and darker.

“I can’t,” I said.

“Would we still be—” Her jaw began to quiver. “Would I still be her...”

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, God, yes. Forever you’re her mother.”

Yolanda swallowed, looking at me as her eyes misted and then dried, the closest she really comes to crying. “Thank you,” she said. “For telling me that.”

I gulped, too, tears tracking down my cheeks the way they just do these days. We sat together for hours, until ourmuscles went stiff and our limbs cold and the air was black around us.

But, when we got home, you were still missing. We were still heartbroken. But—I don’t know. Something. Life could never go back. We may have felt like we had moved to Mars, but we could go forward. And Yolanda made me see that. I’ve kept in touch with David only sporadically over the past twelve months, hoping maybe a criminal man on the street might uncover something about DCI Day’s negligence that I could use as leverage in a real complaint against her, get the case reopened. But nothing happened. As far as I knew, David didn’t do anything, either.

The only thing I’ve continued to do is update the fake social media profile, daily snippets that remind me of you.

There are now just shy of four hundred tealights on our windowsill back home. We look like hoarders. They litter the windowsill, five deep, seven high, spilling over like a waterfall onto the floor beneath them.

It’s become a superstition. I know, I know, this makes no sense: they haven’t worked. It would make sense tostopthe candles, but we can’t. They’re your memory. Almost four hundred vigils, now, from that first April you went missing, through the summer, autumn, winter, and now it’s spring again, though it doesn’t feel like it. The miniature anniversary we commemorate every night when we light one at the time you disappeared. It means something to us that we can’t explain. We have never missed it.

My phone pings shortly after eight. It’ll be Yolanda, wondering where I am—still on edge, either that I have had some news about you or, worse, disappeared, too. I reach for it, but it isn’t her. And it isn’t you, either.

Hi, it says. It’s on Facebook. Wait—but it isn’t on myaccount. It’s on the other one, the fake me.It’s Andrew,the message says, though it comes from somebody called Matthew.I’m using a new account. I wanted to apologize for going off radar with you, I shouldn’t have. I was—I was experiencing regret about something I’d done in the past.

It’s like electricity runs down my spine. My body heats up in the chilled morning air. It’s him. Your boyfriend. Your ex-boyfriend.

Under a new name, Matthew. You’ve been missing a year, Sadie, and here he is, experiencing regret about something he’d done in his past. Talking about it to the woman I have invented: Olivia Johnson.

27

Lewis

I blink, staring down at my phone, unable to believe it. He isexperiencing regret about something he’s done in the past.

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