She points at Amy’s house. “If you keep telling yourself stories, you’ll never allow for the truth. I know you’re concerned about the holes and the walls, but, honestly, Tom, she seems like a nice girl. Don’t scare her away with your worries.”

Mum leaves before I can answer.

If she’d seen what I had, she’d think differently.

49

“What’s up?” Zak asks, but that’s a complicated question these days.

Some people tell their best friends everything. And maybe I would, too, if what I had to say wasn’t so confusing.

Amy tried to kidnap a child. If there was another explanation, she would have come out with it. But, instead, she looked like she’d been caught red-handed.

“Trouble in paradise?” Zak says, because he likes saying things no one actually does in real life.

“No, it’s…I’m fine.”

“And Amy?”

“What about her?”

“I haven’t seen her for a while. Did you two break up?”

“We were never together,” I say, but that hurts because we were. For a tiny, brilliant moment, I thought she was my girlfriend. I liked her. She was beautiful and strange and terrifying, and that was okay until it wasn’t.

Is this what she meant when she said she would scare me? Did she know I’d find out eventually?

“Hey,” Zak says, and, when I turn, Amy’s there and I think I’m going to be sick.

I push my fingers together so the tips of each hand are touching, and that calms me down. Then I count the syllables of my thoughts, sorting them into threes and fives.

Sometimes my anxiety is a trickle, and, sometimes, it’s a tsunami. No prizes for guessing today’s forecast. I can’t focus on her face. My head suddenly aches behind my eyes, and I want to shout at her, but not here.

“I’ll leave you to it,” Zak says.

He thinks this is a lovers’ tiff when I’m really face-to-face with a potential psycho. What other reason could there be for Amy carrying children’s clothes in her schoolbag and stealing kids when their parents aren’t watching?

“Can we talk?” she whispers.

“What were you doing with that boy?”

“Not here,” she says, reaching for my hand.

When I pull it away, she sad-smiles, and I follow her to the head-start line.

“Have you told anyone?” she asks, and I shake my head. “Thank you.”

“What would have happened if I hadn’t been there? Would you have taken him?”

“No,” Amy says. “It’s just…a thing I do. I don’t think some parents look after their kids. These days, everyone is on their phone or their iPad. So I teach them a lesson.”

“You kidnap their children.”