Chapter 6

It had been three years since I moved back in with my parents. It hadn't been easy, but they took me in graciously and helped me get back on my feet. I got a job as a clerk at a local law firm and had my son, Sammy.

Life was peaceful in that town. Everyone knew about the incident, but nobody asked questions, out of respect for my father. They took me back the way they had before I left.

Weeks after Mark's disappearance, the reporters found me anyway. They stood outside the house and followed me to work and asked me the same thing every morning. I never gave them anything, and eventually they gave up, and after a while they stopped coming to the town at all.

The question was always the same. What did I think had happened to him.

The case was still open. I never got a call from the estate. The search never turned up anything. Nobody knew where he was, and he was going to be declared dead very soon.

But I rarely thought about him anymore. There was a time I wanted a way to pay back everything he and everyone else had done to me, badly enough that it kept me up at night. Those thoughts came less and less now. I had a child to focus on.

"What if we go on a holiday?" I asked my parents in the living room.

"Where?" my mother said from her couch.

"I don't know. We haven't had a proper one in years. Somewhere with a good beach. What do you think, Sammy?"

"Sammy wants to see beach!" He lunged at me for a hug.

So we went to an island a few hours from the city, a tourist place, the kind people fly in for. We took a room in a three-star hotel and spent the first few days working through everything the island had to offer.

On the fourth day we decided to do nothing at all and stay on the beach.

"Mommy! A flower!"

Sammy was pointing at a blob in the sand. My parents and I laughed.

"Yes, Sammy. Very good job. Do you want ice cream?"

Sammy cheered and did a little dance, which made me laugh harder.

I walked up to the ice cream place by the harbour and ordered four cones. I felt light. I was humming something to myself while I waited, and when they came I took all four and stood there for a second working out how to fit them between my fingers.

I was about to head back when I noticed something off to my left.

There was a man taking crates off the back of a flatbed. Grey shirt, sleeves pushed up, hair too long. He set three of them down and pushed his thumb into his back, high on the left. Twice.

I went very still. I couldn't take my eyes off him.

The ice cream hit the sand.

It was Mark.