I barged my way through them, sharp elbows and dipped shoulders, putting my weight into it, daring them to say something, to do something, to reveal themselves. To let me know they were for me, they had come for me, and now was the time. But there was blood in my eyes, murder in my face, and they said nothing. They got out of my way.

Across the street from our loft, the men of the meat market were just going to work as I put Scout to bed without her waking. Stan hopped up beside her, curled against her warmth, and I left them to their rest.

But I watched from the window, waiting for someone wicked to come for us, knowing at last that pure evil was out there, knowing we would meet one day soon, and I saw that the lights of the meat market burned all night long, wiping out the sky and blinding the stars.

December: Lost contActs

Chapter 27

27

TWO WEEKS LATER she came to see me.

Anne. My ex-wife.

Surprise visit.

Her old set of keys got her through the communal street-level door but they didn’t work on our front door because I had changed the locks when she left me. I heard her key rattling in the lock and I saw her through the spy hole. It took me a while to unbolt the door. Then she was standing there. A knock-out, basically. The same woman but changed by all the time that had gone by, all the time we had not shared.

‘Hello, Max.’

‘Anne.’

She wore no make-up apart from a light touch of war paint on her lips. The light from the hall caught her shoulder-length hair and there was one single strand of silver running through the dark brown. She was dark-eyed, pale-skinned, and you could see where Scout got the heartbreaking curve of her face. It’s hard to purge someone from your heart when you can see a child you love in their features.

Anne didn’t bring her new life with her. Apart from the baby inside her, which she reassured and soothed with a hand rolled across her belly. The silence between us terrified me.

‘Where’s your little boy?’ I said.

‘Nanny,’ she said, and she made it sound like a destination.

I followed her into the loft, fascinated by that single strand of silver in her hair. Not because it confirmed she was getting older – and she would one day be old, something that had never crossed my mind before now – but because I knew she would lose the special shine I had fallen in love with when we were kids. The shine was always going to go, and it wouldn’t have made any difference. I would have kept on loving her without the special shine of youth. Maybe I would have truly loved her for the first time. But of course now I would never get the chance.