Page 86 of Just Another Missing Person

You nod. “A grim flat share. Cash in hand.” You tuck your brown hair behind your ear. There is a pale row of roots above it. You’ve become slack with your disguise, perhaps. Relaxed into it, after over a year.

“Why?”

You rub your forehead. “You can’t protect me,” you say.

“I can,” I say firmly, thinking of everything I’ve done to find you. Tracking down Andrew, inventing a person, bribing a police officer, forcing her into an off-record investigation, coming here, tonight. How did Julia know? I can’t work it out. Don’t even want to. I’m happy for this to remain unsolved, for ever, if I get to keep you.

There is nothing I won’t do to help you: there is nothing I can’t do. All parents are superheroes, for this very reason.

“The summer before I—went missing.”

“Yes.”

“Well, one day—it was hot, you know, pavements-melting-on-the-news kind of hot. Do you remember that heatwave? I left work early, the air con was broken, they sent us all home?”

“’Course.”

“There was this woman outside. Two kids, about to be deported. They were just babies.” Outside, someone’s footsteps sound near the door, and you jump. I automatically stand and block it, my back feeling shivery and wary. You glance backward.

“Are you here alone?” I ask.

But you’re too skittish to answer, glancing over your slim shoulder repeatedly. “Is there someone here with you?” you whisper, and I suddenly realize how this past year must have been for you, in hiding.

“I don’t think so,” I say. “Do you run this place alone?”

“Not usually—but my boss had to go home.” You’re completely still, just listening. One more glance is all it takes. I extend my hand to you.

“Come with me,” I say, and you take it. We leave through the fire door. The car park is empty, breezy, and we hurry to my car. You look behind you repeatedly, but I don’t look once, my eyes only on getting you inside, to safety.

“Thank you,” you say, as we reach the car, your hand on the door. As your eyes catch the streetlights, you look just like Yolanda.

Inside, it’s quiet and dark, and I want to reach right back over this past year, and tell all my past selves that, this spring, you come back. You sit right here in the passenger seat. Home.

You seem keen to explain. You switch off the interior light like it’s second nature to hide in darkness—and take a breath and say, “She needed a passport off-cut, you know?”

“The woman?”

“Yeah. So I... we already had some.” You cross your legs at their ankles, the way you always did.

“The dud run,” I say.

“Exactly,” you say, your eyes lighting on mine briefly in the gloom. “We already had them. It was easy. Anyway, next day: she was there. And the day after. And—well. Eventually, I did it.” A small shrug, just like that. A confession.

“You gave identities to illegal immigrants.”

“Yeah. One first, just that one. Then her kids. I used to wait for a good match to come in, you know—right ethnicity and stuff... and then started deliberately printing dud runs for peoplesheknew. Such a slippery slope. Stupid, really,” you say, wiping your nose on your hand, “but it made them—so happy.” You flick your eyes to me again, assessing me. “I couldn’t resist.” You toss a hand out to your side and it falls aimlessly onto the gear stick. “Always been a lefty.”

I half smile. You have. And you have no idea, Sadie, that I just don’t fucking care. Send me to prison for life, if you like, to have you back. I just don’t care. Tell them I did what you have done.

“But how did that bring you here?”

“Someone found out,” you whisper. “I think someone put it online... the dark web, maybe. Someone found out what I was doing, just for those people who really came and begged, and it grew. Someone showed up outside, started to blackmail me, taking a cut. They needed twenty passports, they said, or they’d report me. And on and on. It became—a supply chain.”

Your eyes are on the floor again. Your ankles are so slim, the bones either side like ping-pong balls. God, Yolanda can feed you right up. Doughnuts, churros, whatever you want.

“Not what I had in mind for my first graduate job,” you say, a small, dark slice of your humor. “They threatened all sorts. To make it look like you were doing it—unless I complied. It got completely out of hand. Fifty passports on order, a hundred. I don’t know—you know when you actually don’t know how something has happened?” you say, a tiny, wry laugh escaping. That one exhalation contains just a speck of yourpersonality, the one I used to create Olivia, like a diamond that catches and refracts rainbow light for the smallest of seconds.

“I know,” I say, understanding that all too well.

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