Now, standing here on this lawn, white security lights casting indigo shadows across a blued garden, the screaming feels like an echo of what might be happening to Jack right this minute. Even though I don’t believe it, I still think it whilst I wait for this door to open.

I shift from one foot to the other – it feels too difficult waiting. I want to yell: Hurry up! Help me! Now! I have come all this way; it has been hard. My boy needs saving.

The door opens a fraction.

I swallow against the dry of my throat. The door seems to be opening too slowly. What’s the problem?

It suddenly doesn’t feel right. The door is still opening . . . but so slowly . . . and I still can’t see who is opening it.

It’s not just my impatience that makes this seem wrong, too slow. There’s something else. The sense that this isn’t a straightforward someone-answering-the-bell-and-coming-to-the-door is overpowering. Perhaps I’ve made a mistake – perhaps this is not where I should’ve come.

I take a step back.

The door opens and the figure begins to emerge. They are brightly lit from behind, so a silhouette, but as they become a little clearer, my voice catches and dies in my throat.

Along with any hope of help.

Thirty-Two

thirty-two:

– before –

I came home from dropping Jack off at school one morning, hung up my jacket, kicked off my shoes and walked through into my kitchen and saw him. Sitting there. At my table.

Emotion slammed into me. Jack’s dad was back. I’d known the day would come but the knowing and then having him there, drinking my tea in my favourite mug, did not make me feel any better.

The time passing had meant he was both Nick-like and yet not: older, his hair was a little longer, but most notably – he had obviously been weightlifting. He’d never looked stronger. The way he eyed me when I walked into my own flat, he’d never looked more dangerous. His shoulders seemed broader than I remembered and his blue eyes looked sharper, more alert, as if being away from me and Jack suited him, had helped him find a focus that had eluded him before he left.

The shock was terrible. I hadn’t seen him in so long and yet here he was, lounging at my kitchen table. I’d never achieved blanking him entirely from Jack’s life, but this time the silence was so long, I’d hoped.

‘What’s the chance of you making me some breakfast, Lisa?’ he asked, giving me the impossible grin and a hard stare at the same time. ‘I’m starving.’ He drank from his mug: ‘And I’d love a refill.’

‘What are you doing here? This is my flat. How did you get in?’