She was about to be shown something. A piece of bone, maybe, a shred of bloodied fabric, a photo of a swollen corpse floating in dense hidden waters. She was about toknowsomething after ten years of knowing nothing. She might be shown evidence that her daughter was alive. Or evidence that she was dead. The weight on her soul betrayed a belief that it would be the latter.
Her heart beat hard and heavy beneath her ribs as she drove toward Finsbury Park.
7
THEN
Noelle Donnelly began to grow on Ellie a little over those weekly winter visits. Not a lot. But a little. Mainly because she was a really good teacher and Ellie was now at the top of the top stream in her class with a predicted A/A* result. But in other ways, too: she often brought Ellie a little something—a packet of earrings from Claire’s Accessories, a fruit-flavored lip balm, a really nice pen. “For my best student,” she’d say. And if Ellie protested, she’d brush it away with a “Well, I was in Brent Cross, y’know. It’s a little bit of nothing, really.”
She’d always ask after Theo as well, whom she’d met briefly on her second or third session at the house. “And how’s that handsome fella of yours?” she’d ask in a way that should have been mortifying but wasn’t, mainly because of her lovely Irish accent, which made most things she said sound funnier and more interesting than they actually were.
“He’s fine,” Ellie would say, and Noelle would smile her slightly chilly smile and say, “Well, he’s a keeper.”
GCSEs were now looming large on the horizon. It was March and Ellie had started to count down to her exams in weeks rather than months. Her Tuesday-afternoon sessions with Noelle had been building in momentum as her brain stretched and tautened and absorbed facts and formulae more easily. There was a snappy pace to their lessons now, a high-octane rhythm. So Ellie noticed it immediately, the shift in Noelle’s mood that first Tuesday in March.
“Good afternoon, young lady,” she said, putting her bag onto the table and unzipping it. “How are you?”
“I’m fine.”
“Well, that’s good. I’m glad. And how did you get on with your homework?”
Ellie slid the completed work across the table toward Noelle. Normally Noelle would put on her reading glasses and start marking it immediately but today she just laid her fingertips on top of it and drummed them absentmindedly. “Good girl,” she said. “You are such a good girl.”
Ellie watched her questioningly from the corner of her eye, waiting for a signal that their lesson was about to begin. But none came. Instead Noelle stared blindly at the homework.
“Tell me, Ellie,” she said eventually, turning her unblinking gaze to Ellie. “What’s the worst thing that ever happened to you?”
Ellie shrugged.
“What?” Noelle continued. “Like a hamster dying, something like that?”
“I haven’t had a hamster.”
“Ha, well then, maybe that. Maybenothaving a hamster is the worst thing that ever happened to you?”
Ellie shrugged again. “I never really wanted one.”
“Well, then, what did you want? What did you really want that you weren’t allowed to have?”
In the background, Ellie could hear the TV in the kitchen, the sound of her mother vacuuming overhead, her sister chatting to someone on the phone. Her family just getting on with their lives and not having to have weird conversations about hamsters with their maths tutor.
“Nothing, really. Just the usual things: money, clothes.”
“You never wanted a dog?”
“Not really.”
Noelle sighed and pulled Ellie’s homework toward her. “Well, then, you are a very lucky girl indeed. You really are. And I hope you appreciate how lucky you are?”
Ellie nodded.
“Good. Because when you get to my age there’ll be loads of things you want and you’ll see everyone else getting them and you’ll think, well, it must be my turn now.Surely.And then you’ll watch it disappear into the sunset. And there’ll be nothing you can do about it. Nothing whatsoever.”
There was a moment of ponderous silence before finally, slowly, Noelle slid her glasses onto her nose, pulled back the first page of Ellie’s homework, and said, “Right then, let’s see how my best student got on this week.”
“Tell me, Ellie, what are your hopes and dreams?”
Ellie groaned inwardly. Noelle Donnelly was in one of those moods again.