Kim narrows her eyes at her. She has no idea why Megs should find this concept funny.
‘Is there anyone else that Zach might have talked it through with? A friend? His dad?’
‘His friends, I suppose, but I’ve already spoken to all of them and none of them knows anything about what happened last night. And no, he wouldn’t talk to his dad about it. His dad’s not that sort of man. Not much emotional intelligence, you know.’
Kim stifles a wry smile. She’s rarely met anyone with less emotional intelligence than Megs. She sighs. ‘Fine,’ she says, ‘OK, well, I’d better get this little man home and try and persuade him to wake up and then try and persuade him to go back to sleep again.’
Megs smiles at her blankly. She has no clue.
‘Please, let me know if you hear anything, won’t you?’ Kim asks. ‘I’m going to call the police about Tallulah if she’s not back by the time Noah’s asleep. You might want to do the same.’
Megs shrugs. ‘Still reckon the two of them have run away somewhere for a break from it all. But yes. Maybe I should be worried. You might be right.’
Kim turns then and heads to her car, shaking her head almost imperceptibly as she walks, her eyes closing against the impossibility of understanding how a mother and a grandmother could have so little engagement with their roles.
The first half of the evening passes quickly as she goes through the process of readying a year-old child for bed. Noah, as she predicted, won’t settle and it’s almost 9 p.m. by the time he finally drops off.
Kim craves wine but she needs to remain clear-headed and sober because her evening is far from over. She sits in the living room. There’s something on the TV; she doesn’t really know what: some loud Saturday-night fare. Ryan sits in the armchair scrolling through his phone, his foot bouncing up and down the only thing betraying his anxiety.
She calls Tallulah’s number yet again. It goes through to voicemail, yet again.
She looks at Ryan. ‘Did Zach say anything to you?’ she says. ‘About proposing to Tallulah?’
She immediately knows that he has by the slight jerk of Ryan’s head, the immediate cessation of the foot bouncing. ‘Why?’ he says.
‘I just wondered. I found a ring in his coat pocket yesterday. I thought maybe he’d been planning to propose last night. It made sense, you know, given he was taking her out for the night.’
‘Well, yeah, he did kind of say he was thinking about it. But he didn’t say when he was planning on doing it.’
‘What did he say exactly?’
‘Just asked me what I thought. Said, did I think she’d say yes if he asked her.’
‘And what did you say?’
‘I said I didn’t have a clue. Because I didn’t.’
She nods.
Then she looks at the time. It’s nine o’clock. It’s enough she thinks, enough. It’s time.
With a racing heart and a sickening swirl in the pit of her stomach, she calls the police and she files a missing persons case.
A very attractive man is at her door the following morning. He wears a grey suit and a cream open-necked shirt, ID on a lanyard.
He pulls a badge from his jacket pocket and flashes it at her. ‘Detective Inspector Dominic McCoy,’ he says. ‘You called about some missing persons last night?’
Kim nods, hard. ‘Yes, yes. God, yes. Please, come in.’
She has barely slept. She brought Noah into her bed eventually because he wouldn’t settle in his cot after his night-time wake-up and the two of them had lain there, in the dark, blinking up at the ceiling.
At one point he’d turned to her, grabbed her cheek with one hot hand and saidumma. He said it three more times before sherealised that he was trying to say Mumma. That he was trying to speak his first full word.
‘Come through,’ Kim says now, leading Dominic McCoy into her living room. ‘Can I get you anything?’
‘No. I’ve just had a coffee so I’m good. Thank you.’
They sit facing each other across the coffee table and Kim passes Noah a packet of rice cakes to keep him quiet for a while.