Alicia called in sick for the first few days and she did her best to keep me safe and sane. In weird, disjointed streams of consciousness I ended up telling her everything, everything I’d never told Roan about the real reasons why I’d been self-harming.

Alicia was twelve years older than me, but for those days we spent together, she felt more like a friend than a therapist. The sort of friend, I thought, that I’d managed to keep at arms’ length almost my entire life. Then Alicia went back to work and I was in her flat all day by myself. I could barely remember my name sometimes. Shards of my existence flashed through my mind like a psychedelic slideshow; I’d see the fox in the corner of the room sometimes. Other times I’d hear Josh’s voice coming from Alicia’s TV, the mewl of a tiny kitten outside the front door, Jasmin’s mad laugh coming from the flat upstairs. And every time I closed my eyes, there was Harrison John, looming at me from every direction with a claw for a hand, threatening to kill me.

It took the shock of seeing Owen Pick’s face on the front page of the paper that Alicia brought back with her from work to wake me up out of my weird fugue. I thought, Oh no, oh no, this can’t be happening. Not Clive. Not that poor bastard with his crappy single bed and his evil landlady. I felt sick with guilt.

I nearly went, that day, nearly walked into Kentish Town police station to tell them the truth and get that poor bastard out of there. But something stopped me. The same thing that stopped me from contacting Aaron. A sense that I needed to let the game play itself out, that there was a different ending, just out of sight, and that it was the right one, somehow.

And then over the next few days I read about Owen Pick being an incel, about how they’d found Rohypnol in his underwear drawer, how he was planning to go around date-raping ladies in revenge for no one wanting to have sex with him and I thought maybe this was a good thing? I thought of all the women Owen Pick wouldn’t get to date-rape now and thought perhaps it was good that I’d disappeared because it meant that a bad man was going to be taken off the streets.

Alicia pointed at the photo and she said, ‘Totally looks the type, doesn’t he? When you think about it?’

I nodded and said, ‘He really does,’ and I tried not to think of him that night, all cross-eyed with Valentine’s wine, helping me up on to the roof, the solid feel of his shoulders through his smart jacket, the way he kept flicking his fringe out of his eyes so he could see what he was doing, the innocence of him, the guilelessness.

And I tried not to think too much about the time we’d passed on the hill all those weeks earlier when he was drunk and how we’d had that pleasant exchange and I’d told him my name was Jane and he’d said, ‘Night night, Jane.’ Sweet as can be. I tried really hard not to think about any of that.

On Tuesday I woke up in a cold sweat from a nightmare. The details of the nightmare fled as consciousness returned, but the main elements remained: Aaron had died in this dream, and so had my kitten.

I knew without a doubt that it was a shout from my deepest self, telling me to end this thing, to end it now. I walked into Alicia’s bedroom. It was nearly 7 a.m. and I figured her alarm would be about to go off so I sat at the foot of her bed and I wiggled her feet. She woke with a start.

I said, ‘Can you call the police today? Can you tell them you were there? That you saw me. That Owen Pick didn’t hurt me. Can you tell them you saw me running away? You don’t have to tell them you know where I am. I don’t want you getting into trouble. But just tell them what you saw. Tell them Owen Pick didn’t kill me. Please.’

The following day Alicia brought home a copy of the Evening Standard. The headline said, ‘SAFFYRE SUSPECT FREED’.

I flattened it out hard on her coffee table and read it super fast.

North London police have today released the prime suspect in their hunt for the abductor of 17-year-old schoolgirl, Saffyre Maddox. Former college lecturer Owen Pick, 33, was sent home without charge after fresh evidence was brought to the case from a new witness who claims to have proof that Saffyre is safe and well in hiding. The reasons for her disappearance have not been revealed. As a result of this new evidence, police today arrested an 18-year-old man, Harrison John, from Chalk Farm, on suspicion of various sex attacks in the local area. John, who has been arrested before for crimes including mugging and petty theft, is currently being held for questioning.’

I looked at Alicia and I said, ‘You told them about Harrison John?’

She shook her head. ‘Not me.’

I threw back my head and I gasped. ‘Josh!’ I said. And then I laughed.

And then, this morning, Alicia called me from work. She said, ‘They’ve charged Harrison John. It’s all over the news. A young girl came forward to say that he’d attacked her and then threatened to kill her and her mother if she ever said anything to the police. It’s over, Saffyre,’ she said, and I could hear a smile pouring out of her so real and so good that I felt like it might drown me. ‘It’s over. You can go home.’

58

Aaron is sitting in his car opposite Alicia’s flat. I don’t see him at first as I push my way through the doors, shading my eyes from the sun. But he sees me and opens his car door. He walks fast up the path to meet me halfway and almost knocks me over as he throws himself at me, locks his arms around my shoulders, buries his face into my hair.

I put my arms around him too and I hold him hard, hard, hard; harder than I’ve ever held on to anything or anyone before and I feel his love for me, I feel that he loves me, I know that I am loved.

He’s crying and I realise that I’m crying too.

‘I’m so sorry,’ I say, feeling my tears seeping into the cloth of his coat. ‘For everything. For the worry. For the lies. For hurting you. I’m so, so sorry.’

‘It’s OK,’ he says. ‘It’s OK.’

‘I didn’t mean to …’ I begin, with no idea what it is that I want to say.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ he says. ‘It doesn’t matter. It’s done now. It’s done.’

We pull apart and Aaron looks at me, looks hard into my eyes. ‘I knew it,’ he says, ‘I knew all along that you were safe. I could feel it.’ He touches his chest with his fist. ‘I could feel it in here. A connection. With you. With your soul. We’re family,’ he says. ‘Whatever. Forever. Yeah?’

I wipe the tears from my face with the ends of my sleeves and I look up at my uncle, this good, good man, and I smile and I say, ‘I really want to see my kitten.’

‘He’s grown big, man, since you left. He’s, like, almost a cat now.’

‘Did he miss me?’

‘ ’Course he missed you! We both missed you!’

We climb into his crappy car and I pull on my seatbelt.

‘Can I explain, Aaron? Can I explain what happened?’

‘In your own time,’ he says. ‘We have loads of time. All the time in the world. But first, let’s just get you home. OK?’

‘OK,’ I reply. ‘OK.’

Now

* * *

59

Owen leaves the unit in Hammersmith where he’s spent every day for the past two weeks. It’s late March. It’s sunny. It’s his thirty-fourth birthday. He turns to say goodbye to a woman behind him. Her name is Liz. She was on the same course as him. The course was called Sexual Conduct Training and Rehabilitation for Employees and Management. Liz is an HR manager for Ealing libraries. She handled a sexual harassment case earlier this year on behalf of two female employees and did everything wrong. They all know an awful lot about each other after two weeks of role-playing and debating and videos and first-person testimonials. And of course, everyone already knew who Owen was the minute he walked through the door on the very first morning. A surge of energy had gone through the room. An almost audible gasp. It was him, the man who’d been arrested for killing that girl. The incel. The pervert. The weirdo. The creep. He’d seen all the women in the room recoil slightly.

It didn’t matter that he’d been exonerated. It didn’t matter that the girl had been found and reunited with her family. Her smiling face on the front pages of the newspapers had not, for some reason, cancelled out his grimacing face from the front pages of the papers. There was still a potency about the image of his face, about his name. It would take weeks, months, possibly years for him to lose the terrible associations of his time as one of the most reviled men in the country.