“Your little one’s been in the wars, eh?” she said. “How did that happen?”
I looked round and saw that Molly had wriggled out of her coat. She had her cast on the table and was stroking the drawings. I picked up the biscuits and the polystyrene cup.
“Just did,” I said.
When Molly had drunk her hot chocolate and eaten two and a half custard creams, and I had checked the street outside for police and eaten half a custard cream, we looked through the case of secondhand books in the corner of the café. I missed books like this, with tea-colored pages softened to the texture of petals. When Molly was younger I had given her a pound to spend at the charity shop each Saturday, and while she had inspected ornaments and board games I had slid paperbacks off the shelves, put them to my nose, and breathed almonds and dust. One week I had seen Steven’s face, smooth and snub-nosed, beaming out from a front cover. My Brother Steven: An Angel Taken by the Devil. Susan’s book, the one that had thrust me back into the spotlight just as I had been uncoiling in the dark, started the hunt that had finished in Molly and me running to the police car under bedsheets. It had ended my life as Lucy, and I thought perhaps that was what Susan had wanted—to take a part of me like I had taken a part of her. We stopped going to charity shops after that, because the thought of stumbling across the book again was too frightening. I missed the warmth, the smell of damp carpets, and Molly missed the battered trinkets she had treated as treasures. She asked why we couldn’t go anymore, and I wanted to say, “Don’t ask me. Ask Chrissie. She’s the one who worms in and takes things from you. She’s the one who’s famous. It’s all her fault.” I told her it was because we were too busy.
I was looking at a vegetarian cookery book when an other-mother and two other-kids came into the café. The boy and girl sat at a table and wriggled out of their puffer jackets while the woman bought them drinks and bacon rolls. She was older than me, a proper grown-up. When she had settled the kids with their breakfast she took a hardback book from her handbag and opened it to a marked page. I watched them while pretending not to watch them.
“Now, where were we . . . ? Ah, yes. We’d just had the chapter about the dragon, hadn’t we? Do you remember?”
The girl nodded and moved her chair so she could lean into the woman’s side. Every so often she pointed to a picture, and the woman angled the book to show the boy. I saw Molly peer round the edge of the bookshelf so she could see the pictures too.
Look at her, reading to her kids. Look at the way her daughter leans against her. You haven’t brought anything to keep Molly entertained. Your body isn’t a pillow to Molly. You have too many sharp corners, hard edges. Minus one point. Minus two points. Minus three.
“Molly,” I said, louder than I meant to. The girl looked round, eyed us, and snuggled back into the other-mother. “Do you want to choose a book?”
“From here?”
“Yes. Choose one with pictures. And chapters. A long one.”
“Why?”
“I want to read it to you.”
She gave the other-mother and other-kids a long look, stepped toward me, and lowered her voice. “Why are you copying?” she asked. Heat spread across my cheeks.
“Get your coat,” I said. “We’ll miss the train.”
• • •
Molly spent the first hour of the train ride sulking, and I spent it trying to hold myself together. I listed what I saw around me and went to the toilet to run cold water on my wrists and concentrated on my breathing so hard I felt I wasn’t a person at all anymore, just a long-limbed iron lung.
Ten o’clock came when we had been on the train for an hour and a half, and a restless thrum set up in my head. My time with Molly didn’t stretch into the distance like a spool of ribbon anymore; it had a hard end, the ground swooping up to meet our de-wheeled carriage. Miles away, in the Children’s Services building, Sasha would be walking into reception. She would be looking around. She would be waiting for me. In half an hour she might realize I wasn’t coming, and in an hour she might call the police. The beat in my ears was a countdown.
Molly breathed a cloud onto the window and drew a sad face in it. “That’s how I felt when you said I couldn’t get a book. Even though first you said I could get one. By the way.”
“Thanks for letting me know,” I said.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
“To where I used to live,” I said.
She tipped her head to one side. “The school?”
“No,” I said. “Not there. That place doesn’t exist anymore. It’s gone.”
I had lost Haverleigh in fast slashes. The first came the Christmas I was eighteen. I was lying under the tree in the lounge, slitting my eyes until the lights blended into a rainbow. The Wizard of Oz was playing on the telly. When it finished I sat up and saw Mr. Hayworth standing in the doorway. He flapped his hand for me to come. Colored lights still danced in front of my eyes. He took me into the meeting room, where I sat at the big oval table and listened to the grown-ups explain what was going to happen to me.
“We’re all confident this is the right decision—to let you out, I mean,” said the warden. “We’re all completely sure of that. But we can’t guarantee that others will feel the same. Some people believe children who commit crimes should be
