Zara is sitting on one of the bar stools in the kitchen, holding a cup of tea. ‘It was awful,’ she keeps saying.
Lauren wants to keep reaching over to touch her, to check she’s still there. That nobody harmed her, her baby. As she reaches for her, Zara’s eyes follow her fingertips.
‘I know. We’re going to get it sorted,’ Lauren says. She shifts closer to her. She needs to tell her about the Find Girl A Facebook group, before the police get here and assume she knows. But she doesn’t know how. She doesn’t want to crack her, her fragile daughter, not after this.
‘Tell me everything you can remember about the man.’
‘He was …’ Zara says, but she can’t continue. She hangs her head, looking down into her lap. Her hands shake. Tea splatters the knees of her jeans, darkening them in little navy drops.
Lauren looks away. She can’t bear this.
‘God, it’s so stupid. Almost nothing happened,’ Zara says.
‘Not nothing,’ Lauren says. ‘You were almost abducted.’
‘He was in a balaclava,’ she whispers.
‘Oh,’ Lauren says. ‘Oh, shit.’
‘What if I get scared of going out again?’ Zara says.
Lauren’s stomach folds over in sadness. Even now, in the face of all this, Zara is most frightened of her own anxiety. Maybe Lauren parented her all wrong. Maybe it started with Paris.
Lauren and Aidan had taken Zara and Poppy to Paris when they were six. They’d been together for just over a year. Lauren ordered a glass of wine on the Eurostar and gaily commented on the speed of the train, the things they’d do once they got there, how quick and easy it all was. Zara was curled in on herself. Poppy’s eyes were wide, taking it all in. Their two daughters, so opposite. Like each belonged with the other parent.
Almost as soon as they checked into their hotel, Zara started running a fever. She’d had a urinary tract infection the week before – Lauren was forever telling her to drink more, but she wouldn’t – so they dosed her up with Calpol and had a quiet evening. She was better the next day. Eyes bright, smile wide.
They were walking along, after lunch, past a shut-up restaurant in Le Marais covered in ivy, worn like a green fur coat in the sweltering August humidity, when Zara stopped walking. Her little hand went to her head.
Lauren must have made a gesture, or a noise, because Aidan stopped and looked at her, lifted his sunglasses up to see her properly.
That’s when she saw it. Or perhaps that’s when it developed. A kind of pallor. Zara is always swarthy, but she goes sallow when pale, and on that day, she’d gone grey. Lauren had never seen skin that colour before. She crouched down to look at her properly. Little dots of sweat along Zara’s upper lip. Eyes drowsy. It came from nowhere.
In the hospital, it was explained to both of them in stilted English that Zara had sepsis. Drugs were pumped intravenously into wires taped to the back of her hand that made Lauren wince.
Zara had opened her eyes after four days sleeping, and began to recover. Lauren stayed in Paris for five more weeks with her. She had no choice. She didn’t care about the hospital bills or the fact that all she had brought with her were three T-shirts and a miniature bottle of travel shampoo. Nothing in Lauren’s life mattered – because Zara did. She had assumed the mantle willingly, six years before, and she never wanted to give it back.
‘We’ll sort them out,’ Lauren says now. ‘Where the fuck are the police?’ It feels like her insides are on fire. Those little shits. Those fucking little shits. Zara exaggerated their crime in court – their very real crime. And so they go and commit another!
‘I just wish … I wish we could go back,’ Zara says.
‘Me, too,’ Lauren says. ‘And just have you not testify,’ she adds, without thinking.
Zara stares at her, a strange expression on her face. ‘You wish I hadn’t done it?’
‘I’m not saying that,’ Lauren says, though that is exactly what she was saying. ‘But don’t you wish that you’d just looked the other way?’
‘No,’ Zara says. ‘That is what everybody does to homeless people, Mum. I wish I had stuck to my lie. Not crumbled under questioning.’
Lauren sinks her head into her hands. Teenage principles.
Zara gets to her feet. ‘I’m going to get changed,’ she says tightly, standing in the doorway.
‘Sure,’ Lauren says, resisting the urge to follow her up there, to stand watch over her all afternoon, all night.
Aidan fiddles with his phone. ‘Look what it’s caused,’ he says sadly, Lauren’s argument with Zara seemingly a permission slip for him to criticize her daughter.
She rounds on him immediately. ‘Don’t you say that. She did not cause this. They may have got off on some technicality – self-defence, yeah, sure – but look what they’re doing.’
‘But you just said –’
‘She’s an idealist,’ Lauren says. She picks up an orange from the top of the fruit bowl – it looks magnificent, towering goodness right there on the counter for her daughter. She’ll feed her up and heal her. Vitamins, minerals, the works. ‘The greater good, and all that. If we erode that …’
‘You just told her you wished she hadn’t done it.’
‘It’s fine for me to say that,’ Lauren says. ‘Not you.’
He strides away from her, uselessly switching on the coffee machine, then turns back around.
She senses a tension emanating from his body. The difference between their perspectives, where she falls to forgiveness and he to judgement. It reverses if they are talking about Poppy. Of course it does. It’s as natural as the orange in her hands.
‘This is –’ Aidan says. He is rhythmically pulling his hair back from his forehead, elbows on the kitchen counter. ‘You know what else I don’t understand?’
‘What?’ Lauren says through a sigh. She is not very interested in the things Aidan does and doesn’t understand. It’s happening. They need to act, not think. God, she wishes she hadn’t let Zara out. Wishes she had been there. She would’ve pulled that balaclava off. She would’ve been able to identify him, and get him, this time.
Lauren begins to peel small segments of orange skin off, unable to get a proper purchase, a satisfying whorl. She looks up to the bedroom. Her daughter will be fine. She’s up there, now, safe and warm and well. Lauren will protect her.
‘Why they’re so bothered,’ Aidan says. ‘They’re disgruntled football fans but why would they … actually … why would they go for her?’
‘I don’t know. Because they’re violent,’ Lauren says.
‘Something’s off about it,’ he says. ‘It doesn’t make sense.’
‘We need Zara to tell us what the man looked like,’ she says. ‘His build. Anything she saw. And then we go and find him.’
‘Find him? There are a hundred and fifty fans in the group.’
Something folds deep inside Lauren like a popped soufflé. This is bad.
A package is delivered while they’re waiting. Lauren wants to distract herself from the roaring terror in her ears, so she opens it. Hannah, Lauren’s sister, has sent her a Korean face mask in a padded envelope. It’s a decade-long in-joke between them, their quest to find the product that will stave off ageing. They have tried everything. Retinol-A. Sheet masks. An infused sponge from Spain that made Lauren’s eyes sting. A selfie came in from Hannah the other night with a carbonated cleanser frothing around her smile lines. Thinking of you all! was all it said.