“You can’t leave Logan here alone,” points out Dad.
Mum is pretty stressed about our security at the moment, understandably. Even if Patrick is behind bars and if he was responsible for kidnapping me, he’s hardly the only greedy nutter on the planet. There’s no way she’ll leave Logan alone. Mum nods stiffly.
CHAPTER 49
Emily
We drive to the Pearsons’ house in silence. Dad keeps his eyes on the road, he looks tense, stressed. Everyone does, all the time now. We haven’t spent much time alone together since he found me in that barn. Any time, really. If I walk into a room and it’s just him, he makes some excuse to leave, says he’s looking for a book to read or has an errand to run. He is obviously uncomfortable around me. I get it. I’m not exactly cool with him, either.
It’s the pregnancy thing.
Dad hasn’t talked to me about it. Not mentioned it once. I get it. He saw my baby bleed out all over my leotard, and he can’t hide from the fact his princess had sex. I swallow hard, chew on the inside of my cheek as though I am eating gum. It stops me crying. I don’t know if Dad is angry that I had sex, per se. I mean, under normal circumstances he’d be furious, clear-cut furious. But it’s so complicated. Maybe he’s not angry as such, just sad about how it all turned out. I don’t know. Mum says he feels bad, like really, really bad. Daddies are supposed to protect their little girls, right? She says she feels really bad, too. She cried when she told me this. “We’re so sorry we didn’t keep you safer, that we didn’t protect you.” She’s said this over and over again. It’s not like it’s their fault. They didn’t hit me and bundle me into a van. I think it’s a good thing I’m not going to be a parent yet. I really couldn’t cope with the constant guilt and self-blame that obviously comes with it.
I can’t stand the silence, so I ask Dad, “Do you think he did it?”
“The police obviously do.”
“Why would he, though? Why would he do that to me?” Patrick isn’t, like, a great dad to Megan and her brothers, the way my dad is a great dad to me and Logan. He doesn’t make jokes or hot chocolates when she has friends for a sleepover. He doesn’t get up on a Saturday morning and suggest something fun like Go Ape or a trip to London to do some shopping, and he doesn’t really sit and talk to her much. My dad does all of this stuff (well, the talking bit is on a temporary pause, but usually!). Patrick was often absent. He left for work before Megan got up, he arrived home late, loosened his tie and asked Carla for a drink in a way that always made any kids that happened to be about—his own or guests—feel we should go into another room, that we were in the way. It seemed he put his work ahead of his family. I know Megan has always thought my dad is better than hers, but Patrick wasn’t, like, the worst, either. He bought her cool stuff, he helped her with her maths homework. He wasn’t, like, a totally crap dad. Or at least not until now. Kidnapping, false imprisonment, extortion is totally crap. New level crap.
I think Dad has hay fever because his eyes are red and watery. He can’t be actually crying, can he? Why now? I get crying in the hospital, when I was all battered and stuff, but why now when the police have basically solved it, caught the bad guy? He still doesn’t look at me, but he does answer my question. “Well, he missed out on a lot of money, a lot, and I think that might have sent him a bit nuts. People do a lot of really bad stuff for the sort of money we won. Really bad stuff.”
I suddenly get nervous when we pull up at Megan’s. I could be mistaken. What if my hunch is wrong and she thinks I’m mental, or what if I’m right and she just doesn’t want to talk about it?
And if I’m right? What if Megan was there with her dad and she was the one who gave me that water, who helped me? Because honestly, at that moment it was so dark that I think her kindness saved me. And I don’t mean dark so I couldn’t see. I mean it was dark in my head and heart. I thought I was going to die. I thought they were going to kill me. I was lying in my own piss and blood. Never more alone or scared in my life.
I remember hearing a car pull up. Voices. Probably she was told to stay in the car. Probably she didn’t know what was going on, but Megan rarely does as she’s told. She’s too nosy to stay in a car when clearly something big was happening. I can just imagine her sneaking out of the car and into the barn wondering who her dad was meeting. She must have been shit scared when she found me. Was she the person who contacted my dad? They haven’t told me all the details about how Dad found me. They said they will but only when I’m ready. I do know that he got a tip-off and acted on it. Didn’t even call the police, just charged in, unconcerned for his own safety, just desperate to get me home. Sadly, the intel on where I was being kept came after he’d paid the cash, but someone sent him a pin drop of where to find me. Someone was trying to help. To save me. Megan loves pin drops. She used to always send me them if we were going somewhere new. I’ve never known
