“We’d be sending you off to be killed, love,” said Matron.
“So I have to pretend I’m not me?” I said.
“It’s a new identity,” said the warden. “We’ll give you all the documents you need for claiming benefits, applying for jobs. All of it. We’ll help you find somewhere to live, get you set up with a probation officer you can check in with regularly. And then—yes. Effectively, you’ll be living as a new person. Fresh start.”
“But when people say the new name I won’t know they’re talking to me,” I said. “I won’t turn around. I’ll think they mean someone else.”
“It’ll take a bit of getting used to,” he said, “but I think you might be surprised by how quickly it starts to feel normal.”
“When am I going?” I asked.
“Wednesday,” said Mr. Hayworth.
“What if I wanted to be here for Christmas?” I asked.
“Wednesday,” he said.
“What if I wanted to stay Chrissie?” I asked. No one answered. They started shuffling papers and standing up, and I stayed hunched over in my chair, feeling like a person-shaped secret.
When Molly was born my body was with her, feeding and changing and putting down and picking up, but my mind was wandering Haverleigh’s rooms. Remembering Haverleigh warmed the space Molly had left in my belly when she had moved out. I held on to it like the key to an escape hatch, told myself that if things got bad, really bad, we could turn up on the doorstep and ask the keepers to take us in. “I can work,” I imagined myself saying. “I can do anything. Cooking. Cleaning. Molly can go to the school here, and you can look after her, but I can still see her.” It would be best for both of us, I thought: the keepers would look after her the way she ought to be looked after, and I would still get to sit by her bed at night. “We only need one room,” I imagined myself saying. “We’re used to sharing.”
When Molly was a few months old, I sat in Jan’s office at the police station and listened to her say, “The secure center’s closing. The one you were at. Haverleigh.” I felt the words hit my gut, the whomp and wheeze as my lungs flattened and refilled.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “It was a good place for you, wasn’t it? You felt safe there.”
“Not that good of a place,” I said.
Stay with us, Chrissie. What can you see?
Desk. Carpet. Cabinet. Police file.
“I don’t think you wanted to leave,” said Jan.
“They didn’t want me to leave,” I said. “They made me a cake with pink icing on it and the icing spelled out ‘Good-bye Chrissie,’ and when I cut it they all sang ‘For She’s a Jolly Good Fellow’ and everyone cheered. And when we were driving away in the car you could still hear them from all the way inside. They were all still cheering and shouting good-bye, and some of them were crying.”
“That’s quite a send-off,” she said.
“I’m not lying,” I said.
“I didn’t say you were,” she said. “It sounds as though you did well there. It must be tough to know it’s going.”
“I really don’t care,” I said. “Can I go now? I need to get to the shops.”
When she let me go I wheeled Molly into the lift, through the foyer, out onto the pavement. She was starting to arch her back and rub her fists across her face. I tried not to think of baby Steven, squirming in his pram in the playground, but the door was open to the fragments I usually kept locked away. Steven toddling in the street. Susan’s face, pale behind her window. The smell of the Haverleigh corridors—play dough and polish and damp winter coats—the way I had breathed in grateful lungs of it whenever we had got back from a trip out.
The day I had left Haverleigh we had eaten sausages and potatoes for dinner, and afterward the cook had brought out a Swiss roll cake cut into thick chunks. It was the sort you got at a corner shop: sponge that tasted dryly of cocoa, grains of sugar on the outside. She put it in the middle of the table and said, “Right, everyone, now this is Chrissie’s cake so she’s to be the first to choose a slice. Got it?” Everyone groaned and watched me, hawk-eyed, as I slid a piece onto my plate. I didn’t check it was the biggest piece. It tasted like leather.
After dinner I took my suitcase out onto the drive, and Mr. Hayworth lifted it into the car. He put one of his big hands on my shoulder. “See you, kid,” he said. The others were having a snowball fight in the garden. They didn’t stop to say good-bye.
• • •
The air outside the train station was different to the air by the sea—denser, dirtier—and muggy enough that the atmosphere felt paused in the moment before a thunderclap. Everything was gray. We were used to the gray of the waves, of the clouds above them and the stones beside them, but our gray was a hundred different shades and shapes, changing with every swipe of the wind. The gray outside the station was the color of dead things and never-alive things.
It was noon. By now, Sasha would have worked out that I wasn’t just late. She would have called the shop and heard I wasn’t at work, called the school and heard Molly wasn’t sitting on the carpet listening to Miss King tell her she was the best in the class. The police would be looking for us. An itch began at the back of my jaw and spread to my teeth, my gums, my lips. My tongue
