I went downstairs afterward in my dressing gown, expecting to eat on the sofa, in front of a movie, our usual ritual at the end of a book, but Dan had laid the kitchen table and it was fancy. There were fresh flowers and another bottle of champagne propped at a jaunty angle in an ice bucket. The apron was off. He was grinning.
“What’s this?” I said.
“Are you happy to go back to Bristol tomorrow?”
“Sure. If you want to.” I would have preferred to stay here for a few more days, to give myself a chance to decompress, but I was balancing those marital scales, prepared to be acquiescent.
“I’ve got something to show you when we get there.”
“What is it?”
“A surprise.”
He popped the cork and I jumped when it flew across the room. The champagne frothed down the neck of the bottle and Dan licked it away.
“What’s the surprise?” I asked.
“My lips are sealed,” he said. “I could tell you, but I’d have to kill you.”
“Tell me!”
“No. You have to wait.”
“Is it a good surprise?”
“Oh, yes.”
This was exciting. Dan had never done anything like it before. I was grateful I hadn’t soured things with the news about Eliza.
I leaned in to kiss him, properly kiss him, but he pulled back and made himself busy pouring. I tried again but he wasn’t having it. It was hard not to feel upset. We hadn’t been intimate for a long time.
“Don’t you want to eat first?” he asked. “Dinner’s ready.” I supposed I was hungry. Dan pushed a block of Parmesan and a grater toward me. “Your job,” he said. “Don’t grate your knuckles again.”
If he hadn’t said that, I swear I would have done it without mishap, but his words made me feel self-conscious about what I was doing, and my fingers were trained to type, not grate, and I was tired, and the accident was inevitable. My knuckles didn’t bleed for too long.
It was a good meal, though. We ate spaghetti garnished with pointy hillocks of dandruffy Parmesan like messy fools, our lips reddening from the sauce. Dan assiduously topped up the champagne. After we had eaten, he insisted on clearing up and while he did, I stretched out on the sofa and was carried off by sleep in a matter of seconds, as if it was a beautiful drug, as if I had nothing to worry about.
I wonder, now, how I had no premonition of what was to come. How I, who could imagine evil in a heartbeat, transcribe it onto the page in ways that chilled the blood of my readers, was able to slip into an unsuspecting sleep so easily, cheek muscles aching from smiling. It’s a little bit embarrassing. After all, you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to understand that not all surprises are good ones. Especially when you’re keeping a secret yourself.
II.
Teddy insists on bringing his blankie with him, but he sits silently while you put on his shoes and he’s good at being quiet as you walk down Charlotte Close together. Your excitement infects him. You can feel it in his tight grip, the slick of sweat between your palms, and when he looks up at you, he breaks into a wide smile. Teddy loves to do things with you. His trust is absolute.
The night is humid, the sky crisp, clear, and bright with stars. There is a waning gibbous moon and you have a small torch. Excitement bloats inside you.
Once you’re on the main road, you let him talk, but you walk in the shadows in case any passing cars see you. There is only one. It slows beside you and you duck into a driveway and wait there, your chest heaving, your face close to Teddy’s, and your finger on your lips. He mirrors you. “Shhh,” he says. The car moves on.
You turn into the lane that leads to the woods’ car park and as soon as you do, you feel it: the spirits are in the trees.
“Can you feel them?” you ask Teddy. A breeze rustles something, somewhere close.
“Teddy can feel them,” he says.
“Come on,” you say. You lift him over the stile. It’s not easy because he’s heavy, but you manage, and you lead him into the woods.
“What does Teddy feel?” he asks when you’ve walked a little way into the darkness.
“Not scared,” you say. Your heart feels as if it has been pumped fuller than usual. Your mind is dancing.
“Not scared,” he repeats.
“That’s the spirit, Teddy,” you say.
5.
Dan and I made the journey back to our flat in Bristol the next morning. I had still heard nothing from Max by the time we left. I emailed to let him know my movements, but he didn’t reply. His silence gnawed at me and so did a spiteful little hangover.
The journey home felt like the start of a new chapter. Glittering sea views and trees bent double by gales disappeared in the rearview mirror as we gradually reentered civilization, and soon the motorway beckoned. Three lanes of traffic, roaring between cities. We went north. Dan put his foot down and turned the music up and I gazed out the window and looked forward to being home. I’d thought I might tell him about Eliza on the drive, but I wanted to know what his surprise was first.
My first clue was when Dan didn’t take our usual turn off the motorway. I glanced at him and he glanced back at me and raised his eyebrows. He was smiling but I found I couldn’t smile back because this road was familiar to me. We were driving toward my childhood, the street where I grew up. Charlotte Close.
I fixed my eyes on the road’s center markings and didn’t look up. I knew where every landmark on this road was and knew there was nothing I wanted to see here. As we approached the junction with Charlotte Close my chest tightened. Here was where reporters had camped out when I was a child, incessantly calling out my name, desperate to talk to me even after my dad pleaded with them to leave us alone.
When we were almost beside it, Dan said, “It’s okay. You’re fine. Don’t panic.”
“Yes,” I said. It was the only word I could manage.
“Breathe,” Eliza whispered. I listened to her and made myself match the soft rhythm of her inhalations and exhalations, and we breathed in synchrony until Dan had driven past the end of Charlotte Close and on past Stoke Woods, which began where the small gardens on one side of Charlotte Close ended.
Those woods were what I saw from my bedroom window as a child. The old oaks bled oxygen into the air I breathed and enchanted me.
I felt my tension release when we were past the boundary on the other side of the woods, but my relief was premature, because Dan switched on the indicator light and slowed the car before turning into a lane that ran alongside the far edge of the woods. A sign at the junction read “Private Lane.”
I had roamed the woods as a child but never explored this far on my own. I vaguely remembered my parents driving us down here once to rubberneck the big houses, but otherwise this place had been meaningless to us. Another country. Until the investigation into Teddy’s disappearance, when police had questioned the residents, but nothing had come of that, and we had forgotten it again.
“Why are we here?” I asked.
“Trust me,” Dan said. “Will you? Relax. Just be patient for a few more seconds.”
The houses were along one side of the lane only, the side adjacent to the woods. On the opposite side was a grass verge and an imposing row of copper beech trees that must have been planted not long after the houses were built. Behind them was more farmland.