Chapter 9: The Promise Chloe Made

Chapter 9: The Promise Chloe Made

On Tuesday morning my mother pours my coffee, and I tell her I'd prefer tea.

"Since when?"

"Since yesterday."

She hesitates, then reaches for the pot. She is wearing the green cardigan again, and her hair is pinned perfectly. If I hadn't heard her voice rising and falling behind the study door last night, I would think nothing had happened in this house at all.

"Mr. Hale will ring tomorrow," she says, to the teapot. "And Friday at ten, the archive. You needn't trouble yourself with any of it."

"You've said."

"Because it's true."

Across the table, Vanessa turns a page of her magazine without reading it. Dad's paper rustles. Nobody looks up. It is the most ordinary breakfast in the world, and every sentence is a door being closed very gently.

I drink my tea. I say nothing. I'm learning that silence is a kind of answer, and that in this house, nobody has ever bothered to listen to mine.

At the shop, Mr. Abara holds out a peppermint, and the smell of it makes my stomach turn.

"Not hungry again?" he says.

"It's the mint. It's very strong today."

"It's the same mint I've had since 1994."

"Then it's me."

He looks at me over his glasses, for slightly too long. "Go and sit in the yard. Take the stool. I won't have you fainting on the poetry."

The yard is cold and smells of rain on cardboard. I sit on the upturned crate with my phone, and the voicemail is still there. Forty seconds. Unplayed for three days.

I've told myself I'd delete it. I haven't.

My thumb hovers. The thing about betrayal is that it doesn't end when you leave the room. It follows you home and sits at the end of your bed. I can hear it. The sound through the half-open door. Her voice saying his name.

I press play.

"Lila. It's me. Please don't delete this. I know you want to."

Chloe sounds like she's been crying and has stopped on purpose. There is wind on the line. She's outside, somewhere, walking.

"I'm not going to ask you to forgive me. I don't think I'd forgive me. I just want to tell you two things, and then I'll leave you alone."

A breath.

"The first one. In sixth form, under that blanket, you told me what you'd decided. The night you were nineteen. And I promised I would never tell anyone. I never have. Not Jason. Not anyone. I know it doesn't make up for any of this. But I promised I'd never let anyone hurt you, and I kept one half of it."

I close my eyes. The yard is very quiet.

"The second one. Your mum rang me on Sunday morning. Before six. She asked if you were with me. And then she asked whether you'd had any letters from a hospital. I said no. I don't know why she asked. But she sounded..." The wind takes a moment. "She sounded like a woman standing on a ledge. I thought you should know. That's all. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry, Lila."

It ends.

I sit on the crate with the phone against my knee, and for a minute I can't tell whether I'm furious or about to cry. She used the one thing I trusted her with as a hostage. I kept it. Doesn't that count for something? As though loyalty were a coin she could slide across a table to buy back her place.

But she has also handed me a fact, and I don't know where to put it.

Letters from a hospital. Sunday morning. Before six.

Before I walked in. Before I'd said a word. My mother had already known there might be a letter, and had already been afraid of what I'd done with it.

I don't call Chloe back. I do not write. I save the voicemail to the nameless email address, because it matters now, and then I delete it from my phone.

It is a small act. It still takes me a long time.

Then I open the stack of messages from Jason, the last one at the bottom, sent at midnight.

Your mother rang me Sunday morning. Asking where you were. What's going on with your family?

For a moment I almost feel sorry for him. Then I press block, and the little grey circle appears beside his name, and the screen goes quiet.

On Tuesday evening I come home and find Vanessa in my room.

She is standing at my dressing table with a hairbrush in her hand, as if she has every right to be there. The drawers are shut. Everything on top is exactly where I left it. But I know my own room, and the little jewellery dish has moved two inches to the left.

"Borrowing a brush," she says brightly. "Mine's gone missing."

"You have six."

"Do I?" She puts mine down. Her smile is perfect. "You never wear your hair loose, you know. It looks nice."

"What are you looking for?"

"Nothing." She slips past me in a waft of expensive scent. At the door she pauses. "It's such a pretty thing, that hairpin. Someone might get the wrong idea about where it's gone."

"Someone like who?"

"Oh, I don't know." A little shrug. "Whoever's asking."

The door clicks shut.

I stand in the middle of my bedroom with my heart going hard, and I look around at the dish, the drawers, the bed. The hairpin isn't here. It was never going to be. It is lying on a table by another bed, on the other side of the city, under a lamp I don't know how to switch on.

But Vanessa doesn't know that.

Whoever's asking.

I can't tell what frightens me more: that she's looking for it, or that she's already decided it's hers.

On Wednesday, the hall telephone rings at ten past four.

I've come home early. Mr. Abara sent me off with a hand on my shoulder and the words you look like a ghost, and I haven't argued. The house is quiet. Dad is at work. Mum is at her charity luncheon, which will go on until six. Vanessa's door is shut, and the music behind it is loud.

The phone keeps ringing. It is the old landline, in the hall, a heavy cream thing that nobody has used since I was twelve. Hardly anybody has the number.

I pick it up.

"McCann residence."

"Mrs. McCann, please." A dry, careful voice. "Edmund Hale, of Hale and Ardent."

My hand tightens on the receiver.

"She's out. This is her daughter. Lila."

There is a short pause on the line. It is the pause of a man turning a page.

"Miss McCann," he says. "I understood you were away."

"Away where?"

"Out of the country. Your mother informed my office that you would be abroad until after the weekend."

I look at the closed study door. At the empty hall. At the front door, at the little brass numbers I have been walking past my entire life.

"I'm standing in the hall," I say.

"Quite." Another pause. He clears his throat. "Then I'll be plain, since you are plainly here. My instructions from our client are that the original records be examined on Friday at ten, at the archive of St. Anne's, in the presence of the named individual. That individual is you. Your mother has been informed of the requirement on two occasions."

"She told me I needn't be there."

"I see."

The line hums.

"Miss McCann." His voice has changed, very slightly. Not warmer. Just less polished. "I am not at liberty to say more. But if you wish to attend, I would advise that you do. And I would advise, with respect, that you do not mention this call to anyone who might prefer you stayed away."

"Who is your client?"

"Ten o'clock, Miss McCann. The east entrance. Ask for me."

He hangs up.

I'm still holding the receiver when I hear the wheels of a car on the gravel.

I put it down so softly it barely clicks. The front door opens, and my mother comes in, shaking rain from her umbrella, in a cream coat I haven't seen before.

"Lila. You're home early."

"Mr. Abara sent me back. I'm not feeling well."

Her eyes go to the telephone. To the clean line of the cord. To me.

"Did anyone ring?"

It is the first time in twenty-two years that I look my mother in the face and lie to her.

"Wrong number," I say.

She studies me a moment too long. Then she smiles, brightly, and hangs her coat on its hook.

"Go and lie down, darling. You've gone quite white."

Tonight the house is very quiet.

I sit on the floor against the bed, with the lamp off and the curtains open, and the streetlight lays a long pale stripe across the carpet. I take out the white card. I don't read it. I don't need to.

I only want to know she is safe.

I think of all the voices that have told me, in the last four days, what I should and shouldn't know. My mother, you needn't trouble yourself. My father, you will not discuss this with anyone. Vanessa, someone might come looking. Even Chloe, who gave me one true thing and wrapped it in a plea.

And one stranger, who left a number and nothing else.

I put the card in my coat, and I take out the photograph of the letter instead, from the nameless email, and I read it once more.

St. Anne's Maternity Hospital, Ridgemont.

Two days to Friday. A building I have never been in. A man called Hale who knows my name and has apparently been told I'm abroad. A mother who is afraid of a piece of paper.

I don't know what's waiting behind the east entrance. I don't know who my father is afraid of, or why my sister is searching my drawers for something that was never hers.

But I know one thing for certain.

On Friday at ten o'clock, I will be there.