Soon I’m staring at a photograph of Lewis on the deck of a boat, with a beautiful sunset behind him. He’s been much more active on Instagram than he has on Twitter. There are a lot of photos on his page. I work through them methodically, opening them one by one: Lewis bare-chested in denim shorts, holding up a fish, Lewis with two other people, walking along a …
Two other people.
Are they …?
I try to tell myself that I can’t possibly know for certain, but I do. It’s them. It’s Thomas and Emily. Teenagers. As they should be. This is how the children I knew twelve years ago would look now. When I look at their faces, I have the same feeling I had when I first saw Lewis’s photograph on Twitter: absolute recognition.
If this is them, then who were the Thomas and Emily you saw in Hemingford Abbots?
Suddenly I feel dizzy, as if I’m tumbling forward without anything to stop me from falling. I hold on to the sides of Dom’s desk with both hands and breathe deliberately until the fuzzy dots in my head start to clear.
Come on, Beth, get a grip. Nothing has changed, except in a good way. If these two golden, perfect, healthy-looking teenagers are Thomas and Emily Braid – and they are, I know they are – then they didn’t die and get replaced by a new Thomas and Emily. And, all right, I still don’t know who the two children were that I saw at 16 Wyddial Lane, but I never knew that, and so nothing has changed, nothing is any more frightening now than it was before. The Hemingford Abbots children could never have been Thomas and Emily Braid; they were too young. I should have known that from the start. I did know it, but I didn’t fully believe it – not until I saw these photographs.
Do all Florida teenagers look radiant, sun-kissed and wholesome or is it just Lewis Braid’s children? They certainly all seem to have a great life in America. Lewis’s Instagram is an apparently endless pictorial log of every pleasure available to humankind: glasses of champagne, cheese-and-salsa-drizzled nachos, sunsets, beaches, swimming pools, balcony terraces in fancy-looking restaurants …
I take in all these things at a glance, but I don’t care enough about the details to look at them properly. The Braids are lucky and rich; I knew that already. Now, in Florida, they’re luckier and richer. Of course they are.
Thomas and Emily are all I’m interested in. I scroll down, hoping for more photos of them.
Here’s Emily in very short black shorts, a long, floaty white blouse and a red-and-navy-blue-bead ankle bracelet. Thomas, in the most recent pictures, has a surfboard under his arm and sun-bleached hair almost down to his shoulders. Unlike his sister, he seems to favour longer shorts, right down to his knees.
His sister …
My breath catches in my throat.
Georgina. Where is she?
I search two, three times to make sure. She isn’t here. There are no children in these pictures apart from Thomas and Emily. And no Flora either.
Why would Lewis fill his Instagram with many pictures of two of his children, but none of the third? And none of his wife?
A memory surfaces suddenly, from the last time we were all together. Lewis said that if he were Thomas or Emily, he would hate Georgina, because now their parents’ sizeable estate would have to be divided between three people instead of two. Instantly, Flora looked unhappy. She often used to roll her eyes at him affectionately, as if he were a lovable but disobedient puppy, but this time she looked seriously uncomfortable. He put his arm round her and said, ‘I’m joking. Relax. There’s plenty for everyone.’
I only saw Georgina once, but she was a beautiful baby. And Lewis loves to show off all the wonderful things in his life – this Instagram account is proof of that – so why not Georgina? Why not Flora?
Other questions crowd my mind: why wasn’t Georgina in the car yesterday? Why did Flora start crying when she spoke to Chimpy on the phone? Is there some kind of pattern here that I’m missing?
Has something happened to Georgina Braid? No, there’s no reason to think that. Flora’s not in these pictures either, and I know nothing’s happened to her. I saw her yesterday.
I did. I saw her. The rest of what I saw makes no sense, granted – but nothing is going to persuade me that I didn’t see Flora.
I think back to the conversation at the kitchen table. When I told Zannah that the Braids had a third child in addition to the two I was sure I’d seen that day, Dom said, ‘Did they?’ He didn’t seem to know. If I hadn’t told him, would he have remembered? Did he remember, genuinely, or did he simply take my word for it, assuming that I was bound to know better than him?
No. It’s not possible that I imagined the existence of Georgina Braid. I can prove I didn’t. It’s the easiest thing in the world: all I’d need to do is dig out the pieces of a photograph I cut up many years ago and then kept, in its vandalised form, because it felt like the only way I could make amends for that small act of violence.
I stay where I am.
Of course Georgina Braid was real. I don’t need to prove anything to anyone. I’m not crazy.
4
‘It’s seven in the morning, Beth.’ Dom blinks as I pull open the bedroom curtains. ‘I’ve been awake less than five minutes.’
‘I’m not asking you to do it now.’
‘I need coffee before I do anything.’
‘In the kitchen, all ready. Proper tar-sludge.’ My name for Dom’s preferred style of coffee is a running joke, as is his for mine: beige water.
‘Thanks, but … Beth, I’m not bothering Lewis Braid. If you want to, fine, but I don’t.’
‘I’m not on Twitter, LinkedIn or Instagram, and he’s not on Facebook – or at least, I didn’t find him there if he is. I’m asking you to send him one little message, that’s all.’
‘Saying what? How are you after all these years, and are your children by any chance five and three in Hemingford Abbots as well as being seventeen and fifteen in Florida?’
‘Obviously not that.’
‘Then what?’
‘Just “How are you?” would be a start.’
Dom laughs. ‘I see. So this one message, the only one I needed to send a minute ago, is now “a start”. Start of what? A long back-and-forth?’
‘Hopefully, yes. A chat. At some point you could say “Beth said she was in Hemingford Abbots the other day and saw a woman who looked exactly like Flora”, or something. You could ask after Georgina, say, “Hey, I was looking at your Instagram photos and there are loads of Thomas and Emily but none of Georgina—”’
‘Whoa, hold on … I’m not going to message a guy I haven’t seen for twelve years, and accuse him of discriminatory parenting. Look …’ Dom hauls himself into an upright position. ‘You want a definitive answer, I get that. But you’re never going to get one. There are loads of reasons – non-sinister ones – why Lewis might not put pictures of Flora and Georgina on Instagram.’
‘Such as?’
‘Maybe Georgina’s shy and doesn’t like having her photo taken, or doesn’t like the idea of pictures of her being online. Maybe Flora’s … I don’t know, a school teacher, and doesn’t want pictures of her private life online for her pupils to gawp at. Or it’s a coincidence that means nothing: Flora and Georgina happened to be somewhere else on the days Lewis took those photos.’