Go, I told him silently. Please, please go. Please go. You need to go. If you don’t go, then I can’t either.

I didn’t want to tell him that I wasn’t feeling well, and my bump was hurting. If I did, he might stay. If I told him that I might never get away.

His arms were around me, propping me up. My feet were bare. The flagstones were icy, and I realised that that was different. Since my pregnancy, I had been so warm I didn’t usually notice the chill below.

The grandfather clock was no longer in its place. It was sliding sideways.

‘You’re pale, Holly,’ he said. ‘Holly?’

The walls were moving and Zac and the clock were moving with them. It was hard to keep his face in focus, but I thought he was frowning. He was squinting, and saying the word pallor, and blue, and something about listening to my heart, and running bloods. He was saying shock, too, going into shock, and I wondered why he was shocked.

I was no longer in our entry hall. I was with Milly and we were at an amusement park. We were on a ride. It was called The Spin Out. We stayed in one place, standing with our backs to a post and our feet locked down and a belt around our waists, but the circular room turned round and round, twirling us faster and faster as the floor dropped.

‘Holly? Holly, Holly, Holly. Holly, look at me. Can you look at me, Holly? Look at me.’

The walls were spinning and spinning and spinning some more, and the floor was dropping further. There was only air beneath my feet.

My legs seemed to have lost their bones. Something stabbed me, low down in my belly, and ripped away inside. A rush of hot liquid streamed down my thighs. My brain seemed to be spinning, too, inside my own head.

Now
Illegal Entry

One year and eleven months later

Bath, Tuesday, 9 April 2019

I fall into bed after ending the video call with Albert E. Mathieson, but my head is too full to sleep. It was data that drove all this, I think. Financial data. Security data. Personal data. Text and numbers and codes. But behind it all were real bodies, messy bodies, with blood and flesh and damaged hearts filled with grief and jealousy and longing and despair and fear, and sometimes love. That is what gets lost in it all. That is what Maxine and her friends don’t pay enough attention to. That is why they make mistakes. Why we all do.