It took the shock of seeing Owen Pick’s face on the front page of the paper that Alicia brought back with her from work to wake me up out of my weird fugue. I thought, Oh no, oh no, this can’t be happening. Not Clive. Not that poor bastard with his crappy single bed and his evil landlady. I felt sick with guilt.

  I nearly went, that day, nearly walked into Kentish Town police station to tell them the truth and get that poor bastard out of there. But something stopped me. The same thing that stopped me from contacting Aaron. A sense that I needed to let the game play itself out, that there was a different ending, just out of sight, and that it was the right one, somehow.

  And then over the next few days I read about Owen Pick being an incel, about how they’d found Rohypnol in his underwear drawer, how he was planning to go around date-raping ladies in revenge for no one wanting to have sex with him and I thought maybe this was a good thing? I thought of all the women Owen Pick wouldn’t get to date-rape now and thought perhaps it was good that I’d disappeared because it meant that a bad man was going to be taken off the streets.

  Alicia pointed at the photo and she said, ‘Totally looks the type, doesn’t he? When you think about it?’

  I nodded and said, ‘He really does,’ and I tried not to think of him that night, all cross-eyed with Valentine’s wine, helping me up on to the roof, the solid feel of his shoulders through his smart jacket, the way he kept flicking his fringe out of his eyes so he could see what he was doing, the innocence of him, the guilelessness.

  And I tried not to think too much about the time we’d passed on the hill all those weeks earlier when he was drunk and how we’d had that pleasant exchange and I’d told him my name was Jane and he’d said, ‘Night night, Jane.’ Sweet as can be. I tried really hard not to think about any of that.

  On Tuesday I woke up in a cold sweat from a nightmare. The details of the nightmare fled as consciousness returned, but the main elements remained: Aaron had died in this dream, and so had my kitten.

  I knew without a doubt that it was a shout from my deepest self, telling me to end this thing, to end it now. I walked into Alicia’s bedroom. It was nearly 7 a.m. and I figured her alarm would be about to go off so I sat at the foot of her bed and I wiggled her feet. She woke with a start.

  I said, ‘Can you call the police today? Can you tell them you were there? That you saw me. That Owen Pick didn’t hurt me. Can you tell them you saw me running away? You don’t have to tell them you know where I am. I don’t want you getting into trouble. But just tell them what you saw. Tell them Owen Pick didn’t kill me. Please.’

  The following day Alicia brought home a copy of the Evening Standard. The headline said, ‘SAFFYRE SUSPECT FREED’.

  I flattened it out hard on her coffee table and read it super fast.

  North London police have today released the prime suspect in their hunt for the abductor of 17-year-old schoolgirl, Saffyre Maddox. Former college lecturer Owen Pick, 33, was sent home without charge after fresh evidence was brought to the case from a new witness who claims to have proof that Saffyre is safe and well in hiding. The reasons for her disappearance have not been revealed. As a result of this new evidence, police today arrested an 18-year-old man, Harrison John, from Chalk Farm, on suspicion of various sex attacks in the local area. John, who has been arrested before for crimes including mugging and petty theft, is currently being held for questioning.’

  I looked at Alicia and I said, ‘You told them about Harrison John?’

  She shook her head. ‘Not me.’

  I threw back my head and I gasped. ‘Josh!’ I said. And then I laughed.

  And then, this morning, Alicia called me from work. She said, ‘They’ve charged Harrison John. It’s all over the news. A young girl came forward to say that he’d attacked her and then threatened to kill her and her mother if she ever said anything to the police. It’s over, Saffyre,’ she said, and I could hear a smile pouring out of her so real and so good that I felt like it might drown me. ‘It’s over. You can go home.’

  58

  Aaron is sitting in his car opposite Alicia’s flat. I don’t see him at first as I push my way through the doors, shading my eyes from the sun. But he sees me and opens his car door. He walks fast up the path to meet me halfway and almost knocks me over as he throws himself at me, locks his arms around my shoulders, buries his face into my hair.

  I put my arms around him too and I hold him hard, hard, hard; harder than I’ve ever held on to anything or anyone before and I feel his love for me, I feel that he loves me, I know that I am loved.

  He’s crying and I realise that I’m crying too.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ I say, feeling my tears seeping into the cloth of his coat. ‘For everything. For the worry. For the lies. For hurting you. I’m so, so sorry.’

  ‘It’s OK,’ he says. ‘It’s OK.’

  ‘I didn’t mean to …’ I begin, with no idea what it is that I want to say.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he says. ‘It doesn’t matter. It’s done now. It’s done.’

  We pull apart and Aaron looks at me, looks hard into my eyes. ‘I knew it,’ he says, ‘I knew all along that you were safe. I could feel it.’ He touches his chest with his fist. ‘I could feel it in here. A connection. With you. With your soul. We’re family,’ he says. ‘Whatever. Forever. Yeah?’

  I wipe the tears from my face with the ends of my sleeves and I look up at my uncle, this good, good man, and I smile and I say, ‘I really want to see my kitten.’

  ‘He’s grown big, man, since you left. He’s, like, almost a cat now.’

  ‘Did he miss me?’

  ‘ ’Course he missed you! We both missed you!’

  We climb into his crappy car and I pull on my seatbelt.

  ‘Can I explain, Aaron? Can I explain what happened?’

  ‘In your own time,’ he says. ‘We have loads of time. All the time in the world. But first, let’s just get you home. OK?’

  ‘OK,’ I reply. ‘OK.’

  Now

  * * *

  59

  Owen leaves the unit in Hammersmith where he’s spent every day for the past two weeks. It’s late March. It’s sunny. It’s his thirty-fourth birthday. He turns to say goodbye to a woman behind him. Her name is Liz. She was on the same course as him. The course was called Sexual Conduct Training and Rehabilitation for Employees and Management. Liz is an HR manager for Ealing libraries. She handled a sexual harassment case earlier this year on behalf of two female employees and did everything wrong. They all know an awful lot about each other after two weeks of role-playing and debating and videos and first-person testimonials. And of course, everyone already knew who Owen was the minute he walked through the door on the very first morning. A surge of energy had gone through the room. An almost audible gasp. It was him, the man who’d been arrested for killing that girl. The incel. The pervert. The weirdo. The creep. He’d seen all the women in the room recoil slightly.

  It didn’t matter that he’d been exonerated. It didn’t matter that the girl had been found and reunited with her family. Her smiling face on the front pages of the newspapers had not, for some reason, cancelled out his grimacing face from the front pages of the papers. There was still a potency about the image of his face, about his name. It would take weeks, months, possibly years for him to lose the terrible associations of his time as one of the most reviled men in the country.

  The police had found Bryn. They’d brought him in for questioning as he left his local pub opposite the duck pond in the leafy commuter town. It was the same day they’d let Owen go home. His name was not Bryn, of course. It was Jonathan. They found more date-rape drugs in his flat. Reams of incel literature. Violent pornography. Drafts of his blog posts on his laptop. They took his prints and matched them to those on the pot of pills he’d given Owen. He’s on their watch list now, as a terrorist threat. That made Owen happy.

  Liz smiles at him as she passes him and says, ‘Bye, Owen. It’s been great getting to know you. I really wish you all the best, all the very, very best. I hope you can put everything behind you. You’re a good man and I’ve really enjoyed getting to know you.’ She kisses him quickly on the cheek, squeezes the top of his arm.

  He watches her dash across the street to someone waiting for her in a parked car. She waves at him from the window and he waves back.

  The training course has been a revelation. Not just in terms of what it’s taught him about how to behave in the workplace, but what it’s taught him about how to behave, full stop; how women’s minds work, what makes them feel safe, what makes them feel unsafe, what’s banter, what’s creepy.

  Earlier in the week a woman had come in to talk to them about the sexual harassment she’d experienced from a former employer, how he had seemed so nice at first, but after a while she’d realised that every single second of every single encounter, whatever they were doing, whatever they were talking about, he was seeing her as a woman, not a human being. That had really hit Owen dead centre. He’d been doing that all his life, he realised. He had never, ever had a conversation, an interlude, an encounter with a woman without the primary thought in his head being that she was a woman. Not once, not ever.

  He’d put up his hand and he’d asked her how to stop doing it.

  The woman said, ‘You can’t simply stop doing it; if you consciously try to stop doing it, you’ll still be putting the woman’s gender at the top of your encounter. The only way’, she’d said, ‘to stop doing it is to acknowledge to yourself when it’s happening, to own your reaction. To work around it. Think about something else. Say to yourself, This is a human being wearing a red jacket. Or, This is a human being with a northern accent. Or, This is a human being with a nice smile. Or, This is a human being with a problem who needs my help. Own your reaction. Work round it.’ She’d smiled at him encouragingly and he’d put her advice into action immediately. He turned his sensation of talking to a young, reasonably attractive woman into the sensation of talking to a human being with brown shoes on. It had worked. It broke the spell. He’d smiled at her and he’d said, ‘Thank you. Thank you so much.’

  And so now, pending confirmation from the course directors that he has passed the assessment criteria, Owen will have his job back at the college. He has written to Monique and Maisy, explained, without expecting pity or even understanding, that he suffers from fragmentary blackouts when he’s drunk even a small amount of alcohol, that his recollection of the night in question is very different to their recollection, but that he wholeheartedly believes and accepts their version of events. That he is abject with regret and sadness that he made them feel uncomfortable and that he chose to disbelieve them when they had the courage to tell the truth. It was a wordy missive, but from the heart and worth doing properly, he’d thought, so that no one could ever accuse him of just doing it for the sake of getting his job back. He wants to be able to face them in the classroom next week and for there to be a bond between them, not a divide.

  Owen no longer lives with Tessie. He’s renting a studio flat in West Hampstead, just for now. He’ll make proper plans soon. But in the short term it was important that he escape from her and her poisoned view of him. She tried to pretend she was sad that he was going. But she wasn’t. Owen has a sofa now, not an armchair, a double bed, not a single, and he keeps his home as warm as he wants it to be.

  He heads towards the Tube to take the Piccadilly line to Covent Garden. Just before he descends the escalator, he gets out his phone, finds Deanna’s number and sends her a text. Just getting on the Tube, it says. Be there in twenty minutes.

  He waits a beat to see if she’ll reply. Then there it is: See you in twenty minutes, birthday boy!

  He switches off his phone, smiles and heads into the underground, towards dinner, with his girlfriend, on his birthday.

  60

  Cate puts the key in the shiny new lock on the front door of their house in Kilburn. She looks behind her at the children. Georgia gives her a little shove and says, ‘Go on. Get on with it!’

  She turns the key and pushes the door and there it is. Their house. It’s a lovely April morning, halfway through the Easter holidays. The removal men are on their way from the flat in Hampstead and finally, 456 days after the builders first arrived, Cate’s house is hers again.

  The sun plays off immaculate pastel-grey walls and leaves pools of golden light on the newly sanded and waxed floorboards. There’s not a fleck of dust, dirty mark or piece of clutter anywhere. It’s a beautiful blank canvas, just right for new beginnings.

  Georgia gasps. ‘It looks so awesome!’ she says, before running up the stairs to check out her bedroom.

  Cate goes to the kitchen and runs her hands over the pale wood of the work surfaces, the dove-grey tongue-and-groove cabinet doors, the gleaming back ceramic hob. She can barely remember what her kitchen looked like before; too much has happened in between.

  Cate has finally said goodbye to Roan. After Josh had come to her that morning back in February and told her about his father’s affair, Cate had numbly thought she might still be able to make it work. She’d done it before, she figured, she could do it again, keep the marriage artificially alive for a few more years, until the children were gone. But once the drama of Saffyre’s disappearance had settled and life had returned to its normal proportions, she’d woken up very early one morning, looked down at her sleeping husband’s face, always so peaceful in sleep, his skin still unlined and fresh, a vaguely smug smile on his face and she’d thought, Everything about you is an illusion. You have conned me for thirty years and I can never trust you again.

  He’d cried when she told him she wanted him to leave. Cried and said he couldn’t live without her. Of course he had. That was Roan’s MO. But she’d enjoyed the feeling of the power tipping back her way again after so long being made to feel the unhinged wife. He’s taken a sabbatical from work to get over the trauma of finally being made to feel the consequences of his actions. He’s back in Rye, in the spare bedroom of his parents’ cottage. He phones a lot and talks about how much he can change. But Cate doesn’t want him to change. She just wants him to leave her alone to get on with the rest of her life.

  And what is the rest of Cate’s life going to be? Last week she put down a deposit on a treatment room at a clinic in Neasden and once Georgia’s finished her GCSEs she’s going to start practising physiotherapy again, full-time. The children are mainly self-sufficient these days. Josh has blossomed since becoming friends with Saffyre and Cate no longer feels the innate need to be at home for him all the time. She will remortgage the house to pay Roan his share and will need an income for the repayments. She also needs an existence beyond her kitchen table, the stimulation of interaction with people she’s not related to; doing the grocery shop can no longer be the sole focus of her days.

  So many things had dropped into place in the aftermath of Josh’s interview with the police. Everything had been oddly connected.

  It turned out that Tilly had in fact been attacked outside their house and that the attacker was Harrison John, the same boy that Josh and Saffyre had been hunting down. Tilly had recognised Harrison halfway through the assault; he’d been at her school for a couple of years, before being expelled for disruptive behaviour and moved to a special unit. Everyone at the school knew his name; he was infamous for his bad behaviour. Harrison had seen the recognition in her eyes and realised that he knew Tilly too, that he was friends with someone who lived on the same floor in her block. Apparently when he saw that he’d been recognised, he’d grabbed her wrists, hard, and whispered into her ear, ‘I know where you live, OK, remember that. I know where you live,’ before quoting her address at her and disappearing into the night.

  And there’d been a weird and rather unsettling postscript to the Harrison John story; it emerged, once he was under arrest for Tilly’s attack, that Roan had treated him at his clinic for a few weeks, back when he was eleven years old. In a strangely sickening quirk of fate, it turned out that Harrison John was the little boy who’d written the violent rape fantasies, the boy Roan had mentioned in passing only a few weeks before. The connectivity was unnerving.

  Once Harrison had been charged by the police for his attack on Tilly and held on remand, just as Josh predicted, Saffyre reappeared. She never fully explained where she’d been, just told police that she’d been in fear for her life after being threatened by Harrison John and that she’d been ‘with a friend’. The day after Cate took Josh to the police station, Saffyre returned to her flat on the eighth floor of the block on Alfred Road, to her uncle and her kitten. That was the photo that accompanied all the articles in the papers, a smiling Saffyre Maddox and her kitten Angelo. A happy ending.

  Except of course it wasn’t.

  Nothing is perfect. Even this house, she thinks, her eyes casting about the clean lines of it, is not perfect. Even now, she sees, in this newly plastered and painted room, that there is a large crack running from the point where the corners meet. And the builders only left yesterday.

  Nothing can ever be perfect. And that’s fine. Cate doesn’t want perfect. She just wants now, this, here, this moment as they walk around their empty, shiny, paint-smelling home, summer on its way, the garden furniture she ordered from Ikea in cardboard boxes waiting to be assembled, the barbecue party she dreamed of back in the winter months so close now she can almost smell the sweet hickory smoke.

  61

  SAFFYRE

  There’re no such things as happy endings; we all know that.