Chapters (57)
- Cover
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- Prologue
- One
- Two
- Three
- Four
- Five
- Six
- Seven
- Eight
- Nine
- Ten
- Eleven
- Twelve
- Thirteen
- Fourteen
- Fifteen
- Sixteen
- Seventeen
- Eighteen
- Nineteen
- Twenty
- Twenty-one
- Twenty-two
- Twenty-three
- Twenty-four
- Twenty-five
- Twenty-six
- Twenty-seven
- Twenty-eight
- Twenty-nine
- Thirty
- Thirty-one
- Thirty-two
- Thirty-three
- Thirty-four
- Thirty-five
- Thirty-six
- Thirty-seven
- Thirty-eight
- Thirty-nine
- Forty
- Forty-one
- Forty-two
- Forty-three
- Forty-four
- Forty-five
- AUTHOR’S NOTE
- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
- POPULAR BOOKS FROM THE ERA
- When We Meet Again
- A Conversation with Caroline Beecham about When We Meet Again
- Discussion Guide
- ABOUT THE AUTHOR
- What’s next onyour reading list?
Theo looked at his watch; it was nearly one. They would be well on their way, perhaps even already there—and who knew what they were walking into?
“You did the right thing, telling me,” he said. “Thank you.”
“Will you go straightaway?”
“Yes—but look, George really needs to know. And I’d better be the one to tell him.”
Thirty-eight
“Remember, Alice, just make sure it’s her and come straight out,” Joe said firmly, his hand gripping her arm. “I don’t want you to get carried away.”
They had sat in the car for several minutes watching the suburban house, but no one had arrived or left. After Alice’s reaction to their meeting with Jardine, Joe had guessed that the baby was hers and she’d been forced to tell him the truth. He’d put his foot down hard and driven her in silence across town to the north London safe house.
“Then what?” she replied, as she pictured Eadie when she’d first seen her, skin covered in vernix.
“Then we’ll decide. I don’t want to show my face unless I have to. Especially if she’s not even there.”
Alice smiled tightly and stepped from the car. She’d never allowed herself to feel bereft. Sad, yes. Hollow, yes. A constant aching, yes. But she had never let go of the belief that she would see her daughter again.
It was a case of déjà vu: a tree-lined road, a homogenous row of houses, and the same fear and anxiety. She’d visited dozens of houses and flats over her weeks of searching while working on the book, and she’d been surprised and disappointed by whom she’d met and what she’d found: people surviving in appalling conditions, but no baby farmers.
This house was much larger than she’d expected: a mock-Tudor home with a steeply pitched roof, its half-timbered exterior infilled with herringbone brickwork. Sidney Jardine’s handling house was in the kind of well-to-do neighborhood where she would have once imagined nothing out of the ordinary ever happened. Piano notes spilled from an upstairs dormer window; it was Brahms’s “Lullaby,” but the melody felt incongruous here, and disquieting.
Alice glanced back over her shoulder at Joe’s outline behind the narrow windshield. She didn’t blame him for not wanting to blow his cover, but it meant she was alone.
A scuffed carriage stood inside the pillared porch, half-blocking the front door, and a miniature set of broken gardening tools lay scattered across the tiles. Then a child’s cry started from somewhere inside, overtaking every other noise so that Alice no longer heard the piano music or the squeak of the brass knocker as she raised it ready to hammer back down.