A lifeline after all.

He is not down by the canal.

He is not on the bridge.

She checks the estate again and he is still not there.

By the time she returns to the refuge, even the late light of summer has been consumed by rain and night. Lewa beckons her in from the door, whispering so as not to wake Jasmine who is asleep on her lap. Simone notices how content the child seems, oblivious in slumber, and she longs to breathe in her innocence, to take it for herself; but she listens to Lewa’s report that there has been no news from Polly. And then she nods. “I’m going out again.”

“You need to sleep,” says Lewa.

But Simone cannot be persuaded. “I need my son.”

Sarah

At 4.44am, Sarah glanced from her clock to David’s side of the bed. The storm of the previous day was over and unusually there were no children between them. She should try to go back to sleep, but already she felt she had been laying there fruitlessly for hours. Noiselessly, Sarah crept from the thin summer sheets across the thick shag of white resting on wood. A memory of crunchy grass and night-time adventure slipped between her toes. At the dressing table, she reached for her phone.

There were thirty-four new messages. But nothing from the school. Nothing from Veronica.

Instead, in bold capitals, was a draft judgment from her case the day before, for handing down the following week. Calmly, she clicked it open. In the end, she had felt confident in the weight of her argument in court, and in the certainty of justice ringing through. Perhaps the law was unclear, but the principles weren’t; it would have been impossible for the judge not to see that. As Sarah read the opening sentences, however, her brow crumpled inwards. It could not be. She had lost. Lost! She hadn’t lost a case in over a year.

Sarah looked over to David, urgently feeling the need for him, but there was no point in robbing his sleep too. In the dark, her legal brain began to kick into action. She would appeal. There were things she could do. But even as she began to compile them, she could see clearly the reasons why she had lost, and would lose again, deluded before. The law was simply not with her, the law was not with Right.

Sarah’s heart began to beat rapidly, she felt her palms start to sweat. She was still in the open expanse of the bedroom, but perhaps it was the darkness of the blackout curtains, perhaps that was why all of a sudden she felt confined, and enclosed, and trapped in. Like being on a cattle cart. Or behind barbed wire. Or in a small, locked room of wood. Striding across the floor, Sarah yanked open the curtains, pushing the window open wide and gasping into the storm-cleansed air.

“What’s going on?” croaked David from the bed, squinting into the sudden sun.