Then She Was Gone

by Lisa Jewell

And yes, Laurel had never accepted Hanna as a consolation prize. She really hadn’t. And as a result she’d got the relationship with her daughter that she deserved. Well, now she knows this, she can work on it and make things better. Laurel calls Hanna. It goes through to voicemail, as she’d known it would. But this can’t wait another moment. She needs to say it right now.

She is unburdened of something she hadn’t even known she was carrying.

“I can’t wait,” she says. “It’ll be nice to have a proper Christmas for a change.”

then she thinks of the phone call from Blue. Your boyfriend. His aura is all wrong. It’s dark. And she feels it, right there and then. Stark and obvious. Something askew. Something awry. You’re not who you say you are, she suddenly thinks, you’re a fake.

“He’s wonderful. It’s all good.” But as the words leave her mouth, she can feel the heavy lie of them.

Her mother nods, just once. “If you say so,” she says. “If you say so.”

“I don’t think he really loves her. Not in the normal sense of the word. I think it’s more that he needs her, because she makes him human. She’s like a cloak.”

“But what you just said, about him being dangerous. What do you mean by that?” “I mean,” says Blue, “that a man who can’t love but desperately needs to be loved is a dangerous thing indeed. And I think Floyd is dangerous because he’s pretending to be someone he’s not in order to get you to love him.”

“Poppy is like a rainbow. Poppy is everything. But she needs to get away from her father before he starts taking her colors away.”

yes, this all makes perfect sense. Of course Floyd has a dark aspect. Of course he’s pretending to be someone he’s not.

it starts to seem bizarre and dreadful.

she knows, she knows without a doubt that Floyd is bringing her to his house for some ulterior purpose.

The neighbors’ doors that Laurel and the children would post cards through on Christmas morning.

All of those messy Christmases, each a perfect gem, all gone, all turned to ash.

She pulls into Floyd’s road and turns off her ignition. And then she stops for a moment, sits in her car, feeling the air chill as the heater dies down, watching the wind whip the bare branches of the trees overhead, waiting to feel ready to face Floyd. Five mi...

I can see the way her jaw sits a millimeter offset, the slow blink of her eyelids as she finds the strength to come into my home. Because I know and now she knows it, too. I am not the man she thought I was.

Laurel nods. A small drink will calm her nerves. Floyd seems tense, too, she notices, not his usual effortless self.

She can’t imagine that she’d ever found this man’s touch pleasing. She can’t imagine she’d ever found this man anything other than terrifying.

there is Floyd, dressed in the same jumper he wore this morning, his face paused in an expression of terrible grief. She clicks the play button and she watches his confession.

Everything that happened after that meeting was entirely unexpected, and, I can see now, with hindsight, horribly, horribly selfish.

The missing girl looked exactly like Poppy. Older than Poppy. But exactly like her.

But it was a coincidence, I persuaded myself, that’s all it was. A young girl with a fairly commonplace name who’d disappeared a year before Poppy was born and bore a striking resemblance to her.

reenactment began. And that was when I knew, that was when all the little pieces of the puzzle fell into place and I knew it was no coincidence. There was the high road, the café on the corner of Noelle’s road, the Red Cross shop where she bought her nasty clothes. The camera panned across the street and I could even see the distant bloom of cherry blossom on the tree outside her house. My skin covered over with goose bumps.

Noelle had told me once in a fit of anger that she was not Poppy’s real mother, that a girl called El...

here on my TV screen was a beautiful young girl with her whole life ahead of her, vanished off the face of the earth and last seen virtually outside Noelle’s house.

And this sent my thoughts spiraling back to those days after Noelle’s disappearance, when I’d gone to her house to collect Poppy’s things. I thought of the weird basement room I told you about, nothing in it but the stained old sofa bed, the dead hamsters, the TV with built-in VCR, the three locks on the door. And I knew, immediately, that Noelle was capable of stealing a child.

And I knew immediately what I needed to do.

maybe I’d have had a chance to develop that normality, become a guy with a core and a soul. As it is, I don’t think I ever really loved anyone, until Poppy came along. And even now I’m not sure if that’s quite the right word. After all, I have nothing to compare it to.

Another thing that Noelle told me the day she told me that she wasn’t Poppy’s real mother was that I was not Poppy’s real father. She told me that the baby had been conceived using sperm she’d bought off the Internet. I’d locked this unpalatable little nugget away with all the other stuff she told me and stuck my head in the sands of denial.

Poppy was literally, Laurel, literally the only good thing that had ever happened to me. My pride and joy. My entire raison d’être.

met. But again I prevaricated. I did not get a DNA test done even though proof that Poppy was not genetically my child would free me to report what I knew to the police. I simply wasn’t ready to let her go, Laurel. I’m so sorry.

“The nightmare of the thing is the not knowing. The lack of closure. I just cannot move forward without knowing where my daughter is. It’s like walking through sinking mud. I can see something on the horizon, but I can never, ever get to it. It’s a living death.”

Closure, it seemed, had brought you nothing but a box of bones. But I could give you something that would get you out of the sinking mud and walking toward the horizon. I could give you Poppy.

I became fixated on you, Laurel. I raked the Internet for articles about you, for photographs and clips of the press conference you’d given the day after Ellie disappeared. You were such a refined woman.

I just wanted to show myself to you and for you to like me. That’s all it was. For you to find me familiar. To find me the kind of person with whom you could share a slice of cake. I wanted us to be friends and then I wanted you and Poppy to be friends. Because by now I had had a DNA test done. By now I knew, with only 0.02 percent of a chance of improbability, that Poppy was not my child and that the only person she truly belonged to was you.

Women like you did not like men like me. And I… No. There’s no defense for it. None. I took advantage. Plain and simple.

hope this means that in the days that follow Poppy will be seamlessly assimilated into the Mack family. I’ve given her the bare bones of the truth. I will leave it to you to decide how much more she needs to know. And remember, this house and everything in it belongs to Poppy. She’ll more than pay her own way in life.

that brings me to the final, and in some ways, most compelling reason for me not going straight to the police back in May of this year. You’ll notice if you look through the window to your right that there is a flower bed in the garden, newer, higher than the others. Do you see? At the very back? I dug it out in early November, just before I met you. Noelle Donnelly is under there.

Before that she was in a chest freezer in my cellar. She’d been in there since the night she told me about Ellie. The night she told me Poppy wasn’t mine. I didn’t mean to kill her, Laurel, I promise you that. It was an accident. I went for her, I wanted to scare her, I wanted to hurt her. I mean, you can imagine, can’t you, how I was feeling, with that woman, that evil woman, in my kitchen, ripping my heart out of my chest. If you had been there, you’d have wanted t...

I couldn’t go without telling someone and I know whatever you decide to do, it will be the right thing.

for allowing myself to fall in love with you, and for taking these last few weeks with you that were not mine to be taken. Please forgive me.

The horizon is right in front of you, Laurel. March to it right now, with Poppy by your side.

And now it seems her hair-brushing days are not behind her after all. Now it seems that she is a mother again. Something warm and delicate inside her chest opens up like an unfurling flower.

“Is it true? Is it true that you’re my grandma?” Laurel pauses. She swallows. “Would you like it to be true?” Poppy nods again. “Well. It is. Your mother was called Ellie. She was my daughter. And she was the most wonderful, golden, perfect girl in the world. And you, Poppy, are exactly like her.”

“Do I look like her?” she says. “Yes. You look just like her.”

“Are we still going to the party?” she says. “Do you want to?” “Yes. I want to see my family,” she says. “I want to see my real family.” “In which case then definitely.” “Laurel?” “Yes, sweetheart.” “Is Dad ever coming back?” “I don’t know. I really don’t know.”

Laurel takes her in her arms, holds her tight, kisses the top of her head, feels her love for this child flow through her like a sudden, glorious summer storm.

so finally I have cleared up your shitty disgusting mess, Noelle. As I speak (or think, or write, or whatever the hell it is I’m doing with a dead person) Laurel will be introducing herself anew to her granddaughter and then they will go together to the twinkling Richard Curtis Christmas meal in the twinkling mews house in twinkling Belsize Park—and imagine everyone’s faces, Noelle, when they walk in together, those two fine women with their strong brows and their big brains and all that golden light dazzling the bejesus out of everyone. Just imagine.

I wish I could be there to see it. But I denied myself that privilege when I chose my own happiness and my own needs over Laurel’s.

And I’m feeling good. In fact I’m feeling amazing. I’ve finally shed you, like a dead skin.