The Girls Who Disappeared(44)

She pushes the bolt across the stable door and walks towards the tack room. She can hear Wesley following her. Her stomach flips knowing she’s about to lie to him. ‘I can’t tonight. I … I’m meeting … friends.’ She takes down a bridle and runs it through her fingers. She has to keep moving so that Wesley can’t see her face and the lies written all over it. She always comes here in times of anxiety. She finds it soothing among all the saddles, bridles and numnahs. She loves the smell of it: a mixture of leather cleaner and the warm whiff of horse hair.

‘Friends? You’ve got no friends.’

She knows it’s true but it still feels like a stab to the heart. She had friends, of course, lots of friends, before the accident but in the years that followed she’d allowed them to drift away. She’d stopped making an effort to see them. It just seemed easier to stay in with Wesley. To hide away. Her three best friends had disappeared and she’d wanted to do the same. So she had. She’d disappeared in plain sight.

‘I’ve made a new friend recently,’ she says, moving the bridle to a different peg, her back to him. ‘Someone … a girl who helps out at the stables.’ Considering most of the girls who help out at the stables are aged eleven to fifteen this is a huge lie. The only person around her age is the instructor, Mel, but she’s married with two teenage sons and, on the odd occasion Olivia has suggested going for a drink after work, Mel would throw her a horrified look and say she had to get back for ‘the boys’.

‘Really? What’s her name?’

‘Charlotte.’ She plucks a name out of thin air. She’s always liked it. She thought if she had a daughter that’s what she would call her.

‘Where are you going?’ He sounds so suspicious she almost wants to laugh. Does he think she’s really going out with a guy? He has a boys’ night out, as he calls it, every week and goodness knows where he was or who he was with last night, despite his assurances he was with Stan. He’d disappeared around the time that Jenna was attacked. She inhales deeply. She immediately dispels this thought. Wesley wouldn’t hurt anyone. Would he? But she knows better than most what a person is capable of, if pushed.

For some inexplicable reason her eyes fill with tears. She stares ahead at the racks of saddles on the far wall. This is the life she deserves, she thinks.

This time twenty years ago she was going about her life, happy, innocent, unaware that it was about to change. She was getting ready for her weekly girls’ night out, dressed up in her knee-high boots and checked mini skirt, her hair streaked a beautiful honey colour and heavily layered around her plump, youthful face. She was excited about the future, her new relationship with Wesley, her best friends. She was excited about trying out the new nightclub in the next town that has now long ago closed down. Her life had been filled with expectation, with colour, but now it was black-and-white, a pencil drawing that was fading slowly over time. She was greying at the temples, she’d put on a stone and she couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt truly excited about something. How she wished she really did have a friend called Charlotte. A bubbly, fun friend, who would encourage her to wear something inappropriate and drag her out to nightclubs and encourage her to get pissed and flail about with abandon in the middle of a sticky dance floor.

What would her life have been like if Sally, Tamzin and Katie hadn’t disappeared twenty years ago tonight? Would they all be married now? Mothers? Would they all have stayed friends or would they have moved away, moved on, grown up?

‘Liv? Have you gone off into Dreamland again? I asked where you were going.’

‘I don’t know yet. Look, I have to get on now.’ She turns and faces him at last. ‘I’ve still got a bit of work to do before I finish for the day.’

‘What am I supposed to do tonight?’ he whines. ‘They were my friends too, you know.’ No, they fucking weren’t, she wants to shout. Sally couldn’t stand you! But she presses her lips together. She doesn’t want to hurt his feelings. God knows why when he’s always hurting hers. ‘I thought we’d spend the night together.’

‘Well, you thought wrong, then, didn’t you? I didn’t say we would. And after you flounced off at lunchtime I didn’t think you’d want to see me today.’

There’s a shocked pause. ‘Is this about last night?’ he says, in a strangled voice.

She sighs. ‘No, of course not.’

‘You’ve been funny with me ever since. I didn’t like the way you spoke to me earlier either,’ he says. ‘You can’t do this when we live together, you know.’

‘Do what?’

He thrusts his hands deeper into his pockets. ‘Just go out gallivanting. That’s not what couples do.’

‘Oh, really? So, no more boys’ nights out for you, then? Is that what you mean?’

He hesitates. ‘Well, no … that’s different. We get together to watch football. It’s not like we’re clubbing or chatting up girls.’

She closes her eyes. She suddenly feels bone tired. She realizes in that moment that her injuries have helped Wesley keep her on a lead. He’s stifling her and she wants to run, run, run.

‘Wes,’ she sighs, ‘it’s one night. We can’t live in each other’s pockets. I didn’t question why you had to run off so quickly last night –’