She could reclaim her old life. Her only regret was that Sabih wouldn’t be by her side when she did. Her partner was gone, and that took the shine off her redemption.

Chapter 32

So there we are.

Benjamin Elmys, the man I thought I knew, the man Beth and I had entrusted with our son, the man I’d come to call brother, suspected of our murder and imprisoned for the death of another. And our boy, left in the care of a killer, now shunted on to his next guardian, our former housekeeper, Cynthia Hughes. I can hardly bring myself to think about the suffering my son endured and the trauma of being abandoned in such circumstances.

My days are numbered. Or so goes the cliché. I look back on my crooked, broken path and long for things that can never be. If you’re reading this, the chances are you’re familiar with my work. My publishers tell me I have a loyal fan base, and the messages I receive from around the world certainly wouldn’t make liars of them.

Laurie from Manhattan wrote to me a few years ago and asked why so many of my novels involve the abduction of a child. Have you ever been looking at a painting only to have someone sidle up to you and say something that makes you see it completely differently? Laurie’s email was just such a sidle. I’d been writing books without ever really thinking about them, but when I look back through the catalogue of twenty-three thrillers that forms my modest contribution to literature, I realize many of them, particularly the early ones, involve a missing child.

Have you ever seen an ouroboros? It is a snake with its own tail in its mouth. A symbol of the eternal, the cycle of death and rebirth. Writing is a little like that. Writers learn about themselves through their words, and that education feeds our work, making it richer. Our lives leave an impression on the page, but the page marks us, and each word we write prompts change, so in the end it is impossible to tell whether the writer or the imagined world is most altered by the process. Like the ouroboros, the end and the beginning, cause and effect, cease to matter.

Perhaps that’s why I’d never reflected upon my subconscious choice of subject matter. I was too close to see it clearly, and it took a stranger with a broader point of view to notice.

They say there are people who feel no love. Sociopaths, psychopaths, pitiless souls. They look like the rest of us, but they’re very different. I can’t imagine being such a vessel – having form, but being empty, experiencing nothing when looking down at my newborn son. I wouldn’t have been able to feel anything as I watched his eyes, wide and unfocused, taking in the uncertain forms of the world, his other senses alert to the sounds and textures of the delivery room: the urgent voices of doctors and nurses, the metallic smell of disinfectant and surgical solutions, the touch of my hands against his buttery smooth skin.