The Love of My Life(70)

Emily won the magistrate over with her bullshit about ‘just wanting to see him’. He said there was no evidence she tried to abduct C, even tho E admitted that she’s been harassing us.

Waited in the street outside Highbury Mag Court for her to come out. J couldn’t stop me. He tried, but I wasn’t in the mood for compliance. In the end he went home.

Took her forever to come out. She was alone. She’s lost a lot of weight.

I quite literally wanted to push her in front of a bus. You asked me to be a sane and stable mother to Charlie, and then you stalked me? Seriously? You hid in a fucking bush in my local park and tried to steal him away?

How dare you – how fucking dare you?

You have taken so much from us by doing this. And I mean us. You have stripped Charlie of the safe home you asked me to give him. You fucking madwoman. You fucking lunatic.

Instead of all this I walked up to her, calm and composed, and quietly told her that I would make her pay for what she’s done.

And I mean it. No matter how long it takes, I will make her pay.





Chapter Forty-Seven


EMILY


After my conviction I started at the Open University. Three blank years later, I graduated and changed my name. The woman who had terrorised Charlie’s family was removed from record.

I hadn’t gone anywhere near the Rothschilds, nor would I. Instead I used the consuming energy of grief to search for my crab. Whenever I had an empty few days – and there were many empty days, in those early years – I went up to Northumberland to look. I neither found anything nor gave up. I just kept going.

I finished my master’s in Plymouth and eventually got a research post there. I began to lead a life that met the basic requirements of Normal. At times it even felt pleasant, providing I didn’t think too much about where I’d come from. As the years passed, Emma behaved much as young Emily had learned to, and people enjoyed her company. They were entertained by her – I made sure of it.

I’m not sure I was happy, exactly, but I was busy and purposeful, and mostly surrounded by other human beings. That felt like enough.

*

Granny died, a few years later. A man called Leo called about her obituary, and I knew before I even met him that I was being given a second chance.

And that second chance was beautiful; more so than I could ever have imagined. My body moved on, my heart loved again.

But there was always a negative space, a shadow on the sand. That is the way with loss: you can’t undo it, no matter what you have gained.





PART III


EMMA





Chapter Forty-Eight


LEO


Jeremy watches me.

I feel everything and nothing. We sit together, two men without their wives, linked by a nightmare I knew nothing of.

‘I don’t like the fact that you’re learning all of this from me,’ Jeremy says, after a long silence. ‘It’s not right. But if it helps you work out where Emma might be . . .’

I rub my hands over my eyes, at a loss. I don’t know this woman Jeremy has described. This woman he has known nearly twenty years. I don’t know anything about the way she thinks or what drives her decisions. Do I love her? Could I love her? Has she ever loved me, or has that just been a part of the performance?

Emma is Emily. She met Jeremy’s cousin and became pregnant. She agreed to let the Rothschilds adopt the baby; she changed her mind, she suffered postpartum psychosis and tried to suffocate her baby. She then went through with the adoption, only to harass them, and then attempt to abduct the child.

‘This is . . . . This is a nightmare,’ I say, eventually.

Somewhere, in a back room, a washing machine beeps. I escape from the hell in my head for a moment to try to imagine Jeremy Rothschild doing laundry, but I can’t. I can’t think.

I know a little of postpartum psychosis. I had to write up that poor woman who jumped off a bridge with her baby, a few years back; the story still haunts me. But Emma? How could she go through a trauma like that and not tell me? Not tell anyone?

But she did tell someone, I realise, as the truth presses silently in. Jill, who turned up at our house just before Ruby was born, who wouldn’t budge until Ruby was two weeks old. Jill, who never left Emma on her own with Ruby, even when they were napping together on the sofa.

Jill knew.

The thought makes me so angry, so desolate, I nearly get up and leave. But what then? There are so many questions I need to ask Jeremy.

I hold myself steady. I concentrate on my breathing, just like Emma taught me.

Emily. Emily Ruth Peel, with a grown-up child and a criminal record.

‘What about this abduction?’ I ask, eventually. ‘What actually happened?’

‘She hid in a copse of trees in our local playground, apparently ‘just to have a look at’ Charlie. He disappeared for a few minutes; Janice panicked and called me. I found Emma just as I ran across from our house to the playground.’

I rest my head in my hands. ‘And this wasn’t during the postpartum psychosis?’

‘It was more than a year later, Leo. I believe she was very low, but she certainly wasn’t psychotic.’

I imagine Ruby disappearing in a park. Me and Emma running, shouting her name; the sheer terror. It’s incomprehensible that Emma could inflict that on another parent.