‘I was carrying your child, and you chose her over me,’ the woman continued insanely.
‘I had no idea.’ Joe edged towards her. ‘About the pregnancy.’
‘Would it have made any difference?’ she asked him.
He took another sharp breath. ‘Possibly,’ he ventured.
Courtney didn’t reply for a second. Then, ‘I think not,’ she said. ‘You love him, don’t you?’ She glanced towards Ollie. ‘You love him more than our child. I know it’s him you’ve come for. Not me.’
‘Shit! Courtney, don’t!’ Joe moved fast as she relaxed her arm around him.
Laura, though, was faster. Emitting a cry like that of an enraged animal, she hurtled forward, snatching Ollie from the brink of certain death before Sarah could blink. Whirling around, she pressed his face close to her shoulder, stroking his back, whispering to him as she carried him back towards the apartment.
‘Jesus Christ, no.’ Joe gazed in horror over the balcony he’d reached a split second too late to save the woman whose twisted love had almost destroyed him.
Heaving herself stumblingly to her feet, Sarah saw him bury his head in his hands. She wanted to go to him. He needed her, but … her baby.
‘Laura!’ She flew after her, and stopped.
Laura was in the lounge, Ollie still in her arms. She looked past him to Sarah, her green eyes wide, those of a frightened kitten. ‘I had to sssave him,’ she said, handing him carefully to his mother.
Epilogue
Sarah
Her heart bleeding for the little boy who’d finally been laid to rest, Sarah read the inscription on the simple white heart Laura had chosen.
My Love Will Find You Wherever You Are
Night, Night, Little One
It was right, appropriate, she thought, profound in its simplicity. Jacob wasn’t a lost little boy any more. Laura’s love for him had found him. She’d never given up searching for him. Sarah would never fully understand all that had happened, what had driven Sherry Caldwell to such callous evil, but she did understand now why Laura had sought out children who looked like Jacob. Through Ollie, and Liam before him, she had been able to feel close to him, reach out and touch him, keep the essence of her child alive until she was able to bring his tiny body home.
Watching Laura reach tremblingly out to trace the delicately chiselled inscription with her fingertips, Sarah wiped away a tear and lowered herself to the grass beside her. ‘Okay?’ she asked her, even though she knew she never could be with part of her heart missing; her child stolen cruelly away from her. She hoped, though, that she might now be able to move forward in some way, forge a relationship with Steve based on a future together, whilst never forgetting the life that was so fundamentally part of who she was. Steve would help her to do that, she was sure, help her to stop blaming herself for something that had been beyond her power to prevent.
Squeezing the hand Sarah offered her, Laura nodded and brushed her own tears away. ‘He didn’t like people to be sad,’ she said, leaning to arrange the soft toy she’d brought against the stone. A lop-eared fluffy white rabbit, it was remarkably similar to the snuggle toy that had been Ollie’s favourite. She’d been tempted to give it to Ollie after Bunny had been damaged, she’d told Sarah as they’d driven here, but couldn’t bring herself to. She’d held onto it since Jacob had gone missing apparently, taken it out occasionally. Sarah’s heart had constricted as she’d pictured her, a mother who was as lost inside as her child, pressing the toy to her face, breathing in the special smell of him. She knew that was exactly what she herself would have done.
‘He never would go to bed without it,’ Laura confided with a heart-wrenching smile.
Sarah guessed that her fervent desire had been to reunite Jacob with the toy. She guessed also that despite not being able to recall what had happened to him, she’d known he was dead. Her constant search for him was what had kept her going, her mind driving her to keep looking, even in her sleep.
‘Sleep tight, my precious baby,’ Laura whispered above the soft rustle of the leaves in the trees overlooking the tranquil place she’d finally laid her baby to rest. ‘Mummy’s heart will always be with you.’
She’d almost broken when the police had told her they would be exhuming his tiny body from the grave Sherry had buried him in. Laura had always known she had buried him. She’d never known where, until now, hence her endless search for him. Her own heart feeling as if it might fracture inside her, Sarah had held her while the sobs had racked her. Laura had known they would have to exhume him, why they would. It hadn’t made it any less painful. She hadn’t wanted him to stay there, she’d told Sarah, once her sobs had slowed; buried in the family plot that Sherry had occasionally visited, pretending to care about the mother she’d lost. ‘I doubt she ever did care about her. I don’t think she was capable of caring for anyone,’ she said cynically. ‘She was probably only visiting to check the ground hadn’t been disturbed.’
Sarah supposed that love had many guises. Sherry Caldwell had loved Grant, a twisted, obsessive, unrequited love, clearly. Her solicitor had claimed it had driven her to madness, resulting in her ‘criminal act of despair’.
‘It wasn’t an act of despair,’ Laura had fumed in the toilets when the court had taken a break. ‘She was driven, though.’ She’d choked back angry tears of frustration. ‘She buried Jacob to save her precious reputation.’
Sarah believed it: that a woman who had also cold-bloodedly sought to keep the truth from her daughter, the child’s mother – feeding her sedatives, robbing her of the right to grieve for her child, driving her almost to the brink of insanity – had been in full possession of her faculties when she’d carried him from the pool that dark night and dug him into the cold, clay-sodden earth.
She’d told Grant he’d killed him. He’d slapped him to stop his crying, it came out, left the poor frightened child wandering in the garden, where he’d blundered in the dark into the pool. Released from his purgatory to face a yet more terrifying one, Grant hadn’t been about to lie to the police for her. He’d said in his statement that Sherry had sworn she would keep his secret, stay by his side until death did them part. Death had parted them before prison could. Grant, Sarah supposed, hadn’t relished the idea of spending the rest of his life as a convicted child killer and paedophile, at the mercy of those who would dish out their own punishment. Laura’s only regret when she learned that he’d ended his miserable life before he could be brought to justice was that he’d never found out that his wife wasn’t the mother of his child; that he’d been duped into marrying her.
Rocking silently to and fro as she sat by her child’s grave, Laura placed a hand on her tummy. ‘I remember the first time I felt him kick,’ she recalled. ‘Gentle flicks, like soft butterflies. I was mesmerised … but terrified of her, even then.’ Her eyes were filled with long-suppressed anger and raw sadness. ‘She was parading proudly around the lounge, a hand pressed to her “pregnancy bump”, can you believe? I think she was hoping Grant would be more attentive. He wasn’t.’