Part Three: What She Told Him
He put her in the car first, with the heater running, and he went back to the house. The front door was unlocked, which told him everything about the urgency with which it had been left. Inside: dishes in the sink, a half-full coffee mug on the counter with the particular thick look of a mug that had been sitting for more than a day, a duvet pulled from somewhere and left on the sofa, mail scattered on the hallway floor.
He found her school bag on the kitchen chair, her spare socks in her room. He found Mr. Button’s spare — there was always a spare, he had insisted on this when she was three after the first Mr. Button was left at a service station and the subsequent ninety minutes had redefined his understanding of crisis — in the drawer of her bedside table where it was kept.
He took what she needed immediately. He would deal with the rest later.
Back in the car, with the heater going and his jacket still around her shoulders, she sat on the back seat and he sat half-turned in the driver’s seat, and he gave her water from the bottle in his bag — she drank it steadily, without stopping, which told him how thirsty she was — and he waited until she had finished before he asked.
“Emma. Can you tell me what happened? Just what you remember.”
She held the water bottle in both hands and looked at it.
“Marcus came,” she said. “About three weeks ago. He started coming every day.”
Marcus. He kept his voice neutral. “Do you know his last name?”
She shook her head. “Mum called him Mark sometimes but he didn’t like it.”
He absorbed this.
“And then?”
“He said I was bad.” She said it matter-of-factly, the way children said things they had heard enough times to have ceased questioning. “He said I was too loud and too messy and I talked too much and I was a bad influence on Mum being happy.” She turned the water bottle in her hands. “He put me in the crate because he said I needed to think about my behavior.”
“When did he put you in the crate?”
She thought about it. “I think three days ago. Or four. I couldn’t tell.”
“Did you have food? Water?”
She hesitated, in the specific way of a child who didn’t want to say something that would upset someone they loved.
“Emma,” he said, very gently. “I need to know. You won’t be in trouble.”
“He brought water once,” she said. “Yesterday, or maybe the day before. He brought a piece of bread and said I should be grateful.”
He put his hand over hers. He held it there.
“Where was your mum while this was happening?”
Emma was quiet for a long moment.
“She was there at first,” she said. “She told him it was enough, I think. But then she didn’t say it anymore.” A pause. “And then they left.”
He looked at his daughter’s face. At the shadows under her eyes that were not the shadows of one missed night’s sleep. At the way she held herself — not with a child’s ordinary easiness but with a carefulness, a bodily tentativeness, that was not right and was not hers.
“You’ve done nothing wrong,” he said. “Do you understand that? Not a single thing.”
She looked at him. She was weighing something, he could see her doing it, the way children weighed things when they had learned that adults’ words and adults’ actions did not always correspond.
“I know,” she said, finally, and he didn’t know if she believed it yet, but he was going to spend the rest of his life ensuring that she did.
He started the car.
“We’re going to the hospital,” he said. “Just so a doctor can check you’re okay. Then we’re going somewhere safe.”
“Where?”
“Aunt Sarah’s. Do you remember Aunt Sarah?”
Emma nodded slowly. Sarah was his sister, three years older, who had a house in the next county with a spare room with yellow curtains and a cat named Geoffrey who tolerated children with varying degrees of enthusiasm.
“Will Geoffrey be there?”
“Geoffrey lives there. He’ll definitely be there.”
Something crossed her face that was almost — not quite, but almost — the beginning of relief.
He pulled out of Millbrook Lane and did not look back.
