Mostly, these days—I got mellower after Holly came along—I hoped Rosie would turn up under the radar somewhere, living one of those straightforward, contented lives that never hit the system, remembering me every now and then with a piercing little tug as the one who might have been. Sometimes I pictured her finding me: the phone ringing in the middle of the night, the tap at my office door. I pictured us side by side on a bench in some green park, watching in a bittersweet silence while Holly swung on a climbing frame with two little redheaded boys. I pictured an endless evening in some dim pub, our heads bending closer and closer under the talk and laughter as the night got later, our fingers sliding towards each other on the battered wood of the table. I pictured every inch of what she would look like now: the crow’s-feet from smiles I hadn’t seen, the softness of her belly from kids who weren’t mine, all her life that I had missed written on her body in Braille for my hands to read. I pictured her giving me answers I had never thought of, the ones that would make sense of everything, send every jagged edge sliding smoothly into place. I pictured, believe it or not, a second chance.

Other nights, even after all this time, I still wanted what I wanted when I was twenty: to see her show up as some Domestic Violence Squad’s frequent flier, in someone’s hooker file flagged for HIV, as an overdose in a morgue in a ruthless part of London. I had read the descriptions of hundreds of Jane Does, over the years.

All my signposts had gone up in one blinding, dizzying explosion: my second chances, my revenge, my nice thick anti-family Maginot line. Rosie Daly dumping my sorry ass had been my landmark, huge and solid as a mountain. Now it was flickering like a mirage and the landscape kept shifting around it, turning itself inside out and backwards; none of the scenery looked familiar any more.

I ordered another pint, with a double Jameson’s on the side, which as far as I could see was my only chance of making it to the morning. I couldn’t think of a single other thing that would wipe my mind clean of that image, the nightmare made of slimy brown bones curled in its burrow, trickles of earth falling onto it with a sound like tiny scurrying feet.

Chapter 7

7