Chapter no 4

The Reappearance of Rachel Price

Rachel Price alive again, brought back through time, lips grazing her bared teeth as she smiled through the cold.

“Jeﬀ,” she said in a voice that almost sounded real. “Are you recording?”

“What gave you that idea?” came Jeﬀ’s voice, distorted and crackly, too close to the microphone. “The camera in my hand?”

Jeﬀ-from-now laughed at his own joke.

The angle shifted as past-Jeﬀ stepped forward, and now Bel could see a well-padded baby in the cradle of Rachel’s arm, body in line with hers, fast asleep. Not just a baby, it was Bel, she knew that, yet she felt detached from the small sleeping child; they were from two diﬀerent worlds.

“Look at you,” Sherry-from-now said, just as the past version of her spoke too:

“I’m giving up if no one’s helping me with this snowman!”

Younger Sherry walked on-screen, prints following her in the snow, Charlie too. They were bundled up in thick coats and gloves, hats that swallowed half their frost-pinked faces.

A snowball exploded against Sherry’s chest, spattering white dust on her chin.

“Jeﬀ, I’ll kill you,” she growled at the camera. “You could have hit the baby.”

“Anna’s ﬁne.” Rachel smiled down at the baby, eyes glittering. “She can sleep through anything.”

Bel forgot, for a moment, that that was her; the ﬁrst part of her name that she’d amputated years ago. She didn’t know Rachel had called her Anna; no one had ever told her.

“Come on, Charlie, Jeﬀ. One of you hop on!” came Grandpa’s old voice

—older but younger. He still sounded like himself; Bel missed that. The camera panned to ﬁnd him, squatting on a blue sled that was far too small for him, let alone another grown man.

A grin split her dad’s face, this younger version of him in the snow. He squeezed Rachel’s shoulder as he passed, giggling when he dropped onto the front of the sled, tucked between Grandpa’s legs.

“Go on, Dad!” Jeﬀ called.

Grandpa kicked oﬀ against the snow and the sled started to move. Jeﬀ chased after them, feet crunching. The camera swerved and Bel ﬁnally knew where they all were. She could tell by the junk pile of rusted cars and dead equipment in the distance behind them. She recognized the old red truck in the middle of the pileup, and the tall framework she always thought looked like a mechanical giraﬀe. Called it Larry. They were at Price & Sons Logging Yard, owned by Grandpa, and his dad and grandpa before him. It had gone out of business maybe thirty years ago, before her dad or Jeﬀ had really had a chance to become those sons, but it had a good slope down toward the river and was the perfect place to sled when the snow was right. As long as you didn’t go anywhere near all the old trucks and saws and dangerous equipment, otherwise Grandpa got mad.

He wasn’t mad now, though, laughing as he and Charlie sped down the hill.

The sled tipped over, Charlie did it on purpose, a cascade of snow glittering down on him and Grandpa. They laughed and laughed in the way that hurts if you do it too long, half buried there.

Rachel’s voice ﬂoated in from behind the camera, detached from her body. “Oh no, they’re gone, Anna. We lost them in the snow forever.”

The clip ended, and the television screen went dark.

“Wow.” Sherry was the ﬁrst to speak. “You forget just how young she was when it happened.”

“So young,” Jeﬀ agreed. “I mean, there’s only nine years now, Bel, between you and your mom there.”

It felt much greater than that.

“There was quite an age diﬀerence between you all, wasn’t there?” Ramsey said. “Nine years, Charlie, between you and Rachel.”

“Yes,” Charlie said, speaking around the lump in his throat; no one else would hear it but Bel. He ﬁddled with his left hand.

“How is that for you, to see those happy family memories?”

“It’s hard,” Charlie sniﬀed. “When I see Rachel smiling like that, it makes me want to smile too, with her, like it’s instinct. She was infectious like that. I know it’s a thing people say, and maybe she didn’t light up every room, but she lit up every room for me.” He paused. Bel glanced back and saw that his eyes had gone glassy, the silent threat of silent tears. “But I know I’ll never see her again, and it takes my body a few seconds to catch up. It’s hard,” he summed up again. “Sometimes it’s easier, not to see her face.”

“I can’t help but notice you’re still wearing your wedding ring,” Ramsey said. Bel couldn’t help but notice either now because her dad was ﬁddling with it, spinning it around the pudge of his ﬁnger, backward and forward.

Charlie looked down at it, like he was seeing it for the ﬁrst time. “Yes, I still wear my wedding ring.” A small, pained smile. “If I’m being honest, I’m not sure I could take it oﬀ anymore if I wanted to.” He attempted it, pulling at the metal band. “No, stuck on there pretty good. Guess my ﬁngers are a little fatter than they used to be. It’s engraved on the inside, the date of our wedding: July twenty-third, 2005. Best day of my life…” An empty laugh, to push away the tears. “I like wearing the ring. It’s a little reminder of Rachel, of the life we had together, however short it was. Means she’s still here in some small way.”

“That’s really sweet, Charlie,” Sherry commented, leaning across to pat him on the knee. “Going to make me cry over here.”

Ramsey looked almost annoyed at the intrusion, the moment gone, Dad’s face straightened out.

“Now, Carter,” Ramsey said, and she almost jumped, so surprised at the sound of her own name. “You never knew your aunt Rachel; you were born four months after she went missing. What has that been like, growing up with Rachel having such a presence in your life, when you never actually met her?”

Carter cleared her throat, shifting her legs. “I mean, I think it’s that word you said. Presence. She might have disappeared, but she’s always been a part of my family, one of the Prices, even though we had no overlap. It’s like with older relatives you never meet, like Grandma Price.” She gestured at Grandpa, who stared ahead at nothing. “You feel like you knew them, because of the memories and stories people share. And without Rachel, I wouldn’t have Bel, so…”

Carter trailed oﬀ, smiling at Bel instead, and somehow that said enough, that said more. But it wouldn’t last forever, people didn’t, and Carter would be gone in two-and-a-bit years.

“Great answer, honey,” Sherry said, dabbing her eyes. Carter shifted her legs back.

“Yes, it was,” Ramsey agreed. “And in some small way, you did overlap with Rachel in that clip. Because, Sherry, you would have been pregnant with Carter that Christmas, wouldn’t you?”

Sherry’s eyes calculated, ﬂicking back and forth. “Yes,” she said, “you’re right. It would have been early on; I wasn’t yet showing.”

“Thank God, otherwise we would have had to cart you around on that sled.” Charlie leaned forward to tease her, his breath in Bel’s hair. “She just ballooned up like a whale at what, six, seven months. And then…” Charlie stopped to rub his nose. “Well, then I was arrested in June, in custody, so I never got to see you at your biggest, didn’t actually get to meet Carter until she was six months old.”

“It’s a great feeling when your brother-in-law refers to you as a whale,” Sherry laughed, stretching her powdered-sugar skin. “But he’s right, I did just pop out of nowhere. I remember, we hadn’t really told anyone yet. Jeﬀ and I struggled for a long time to have a baby.” She took Jeﬀ’s hand out of his lap. “We’d been trying almost ten years, so we’d learned to keep things to ourselves, to not get too excited in those early stages. I was thirty-eight when we had Carter, our miracle baby. But then, you know, it was everything going on with Rachel’s disappearance, and we didn’t want to add to any of that stress and upheaval. So we kept it to ourselves, until we couldn’t keep it to ourselves anymore.”

“Because of the whale-belly,” Charlie added.

“Well, she doesn’t look like a whale anymore.” Sherry bent forward to tickle the sides of Carter’s long neck. Carter tried to pull away and Sherry dropped the smile, but her dimples stayed, an afterlife preserved in makeup. She withdrew and looked up at Ramsey. “Sorry, I know that’s not what this documentary is about. Us. You can cut the useless parts out, right?”

“No, no,” Ramsey corrected her. “This is what the documentary is about. All this life stuﬀ, family stuﬀ, and how Rachel’s disappearance aﬀected other aspects of everyday life people wouldn’t think of. You keeping your pregnancy under wraps, Charlie not meeting his niece until she was six months old because of the trial. That’s the story I’m interested in telling. The Rachel in everything. It’s all good stuﬀ.”

“All good stuﬀ, Carter.” Sherry glowed, running her ﬁngers through her daughter’s copper hair. “We must have known she was going to be tall and beautiful, huh? Named her after Carter Dome, it’s a mountain close by. That’s where me and Jeﬀ—”

Charlie coughed, cutting her oﬀ, choking on nothing. “What?” Sherry turned to him. Bel did too.

Charlie laughed awkwardly through his nose. “I know Ramsey asked for honesty, but you don’t have to say everything on camera.”

“What are you talking about?” Sherry rounded on him. “It’s where me

and Jeﬀ got engaged.”

“Oh,” Charlie said, lips puckered out, holding on to the shape. Then a louder “Oh,” before he cracked up, a loud, wheezing laugh that came from the ribs. “I thought you were going to say it was where Carter was, y’know, conceived.”

“What, no!” Sherry screeched, hands raised in defense. “Did you really

think that was the reason we named her that?”

“Dad!” Bel did her duty, telling him oﬀ, splitting the word into two disapproving syllables.

Jeﬀ and Sherry were hooting now too.

“Urgh, Uncle Charlie.” Carter pulled a face, looking out at Ramsey and the rest of the crew. “I guess you can’t choose your family, can you?” she said with a sniﬀ.

“This is perfect, guys.” Ramsey grinned down at the monitor. “Really great. The next clip is from January 2009.”

He pressed a button and the television static-crackled back into life, taking them to a diﬀerent living room: the one in Grandpa’s house.

The shot settled on the chair in the corner of the room. Bel was sitting on Grandpa’s lap while he read to her from a green hardcover book. She was much bigger than they’d last seen her, but still tiny, the book almost as big as she was.

“…the memory thief studied the back of her pretty red head,” Grandpa was reading out in his deep storybook voice. “The knife still clutched in his hand.”

“Pat,” Sherry’s voice chimed in behind the camera, “pretty sure that book is far too old for her. Doesn’t even have pictures.”

“Don’t be silly, Sherry,” Grandpa shot her down, returning his eyes to the book. “She doesn’t know what it’s about, just likes the sounds, don’t you, Annabel?”

“Ye, Paw-Paw,” little Annabel said, well on her way to three years old, ﬁngers tracing the page.

“She loves it. It’s a special book, isn’t it, little one?”

The camera shuﬄed over to a car seat positioned by the sofa. There was a new sleeping baby there, a pink-faced Carter.

“They should be back soon, shouldn’t they?” Sherry said, a quiver in her voice.

“Any minute,” Grandpa replied, one in his too.

“Wait.” Sherry’s breath rattled, windstorm hard, behind the camera. “I hear a car. I think that’s them. Annabel, come with me, honey!” Sherry hurried out of the room, blurring the shot. She pulled the front door open, the chirping sounds of a small girl behind her. “Annabel, it’s your daddy, look!”

A small black truck had pulled up outside the house. The driver’s-side door opened and Charlie stepped out, wearing a smart suit, the tie undone into two loose snakes ﬂapping over his shoulders.

“Where is she?” he called to Sherry, grinning. “Where’s Annabel?”

The angle shuddered as a small blond head pushed through Sherry’s legs. “There she is!” Charlie crouched down with his arms outstretched, voice thick with tears already. Uncle Jeﬀ stepped out of the truck behind him, but

Charlie only had eyes for her. “Come here, baby girl.”

“My daddy!” small Annabel screeched as her little legs raced beneath her, unsteady and unbalanced, jumping toward him headﬁrst. Her dad caught her before she hit the ground. He straightened up, holding her tightly in his arms, her face buried next to his, coming up wet with his kisses and his tears.

“Daddy’s home,” he said into her ruﬄed hair. “Not leaving again. Never leaving you again, I promise, Annabel.”

The small child nodded, snatching his promise from the air, pressing her hand to his mouth. Charlie blew a loud raspberry against it.

“Daddy, ’top it. Come see my baby.” She pointed a stubby ﬁnger back toward the camera. Back toward her eighteen-year-old self, sitting on the living room ﬂoor, watching.

The screen went dark.

A sniﬀ behind Bel; her dad was crying in this timeline too, dabbing at his eyes with his darkening sleeves.

“Sorry,” he coughed, embarrassed. Bel wrapped her arm around one of his legs.

“No, don’t be sorry at all,” Ramsey said gently. “Can you tell us what was happening in that clip?”

“Not sure I can,” Charlie said, a shuddering huﬀ. He hid his face. Sherry was crying too, in a prettier way, face intact.

And Grandpa wouldn’t remember. That left only Jeﬀ.

“That was the day of the verdict,” he said, ﬁnally getting a word in edgewise. “The jury reached their decision after two days of deliberation. Sherry stayed home to watch the kids. Dad couldn’t bear to come to the courthouse; he was sick with nerves, terriﬁed it would be a guilty verdict, so I went alone. The jury returned a verdict of Not guilty. Which meant that Charlie was ﬁnally free, that he could ﬁnally come home. It was an emotional day.”

“You spent a total of seven months in custody, Charlie, awaiting trial,” Ramsey tried with him again. “That must have felt like a very long time.”

Charlie nodded. “Too long. To be away from Bel when she was so young. But that was a good day. Bittersweet, because we still didn’t have Rachel and no answers on what really happened to her. But it was the end of such an awful period of my life. I was just so happy to be back with my family.”

“We were happy to have you back,” Jeﬀ added.

“Yes,” Sherry sniﬀed. “Not that we didn’t love having Bel. She came to live with us when Charlie was arrested, and we had a new baby on the way imminently. Went from having no children in the house to two in quick succession. It was…” Sherry paused, chewing on the thought. “Eventful. A little overwhelming. But Bel was a very sweet little girl. She used to ask us: Where’s Mommy? Where’s Daddy? Didn’t she, Jeﬀ? But eventually, she stopped asking. And once Carter arrived, Bel was obsessed with her. Used to call her my baby, like you saw there.”

Bel turned to Carter, mouthed my baby at her, more demonically than Sherry had described it.

Carter snorted.

“And Patrick helped us out a lot, didn’t you?” Sherry directed the words toward Grandpa. “We had a home birth, when Carter arrived—I’m not into hospitals or needles and all of that crap.”

All of that crap. Don’t get her started on homeopathic teas.

“…So Pat took Bel for a few days when Carter was born. He helped us a lot with the girls, loves his granddaughters. You loved reading to Bel, didn’t you, Pat? We were all ﬁguring everything out together, as a family unit. I think we did a pretty good job.”

“Yes, you did,” Charlie said softly. “And I’m so grateful you were all there for Bel when I couldn’t be. I’ll never be able to thank you enough. Don’t think I’ve said it as much as I should.”

“You don’t need to.” Jeﬀ looked across Sherry at him, brother to brother. “That’s what family is for. I had no doubt they were going to ﬁnd you innocent that day. That’s why I took Charlie’s truck to the courthouse; I knew he would want to drive it home, a free man.”

“That’s right,” Charlie said, wiping his eyes. “My Ford F-Series. I loved that truck. I’d only bought it a few weeks before I was arrested and I—”

“Gotta go to the bathroom,” Jeﬀ muttered quickly, standing up and walking away from the sofa before anyone could say anything.

Ramsey’s eyes widened. The rest of the crew exchanged looks. “Jeﬀ, you can’t just—”

But Jeﬀ could, because he was already gone, out into the hallway, closing the bathroom door behind him. Not good at reading rooms, Uncle Jeﬀ.

A moment later, Ash pulled a pained face, lifting the headphones oﬀ his ears, holding them over his head like a crown.

“He’s still got his mike on,” he said. “You can hear him peeing?” Bel asked. “Oh yeah. Really going for it.”

Carter smacked her forehead. “Kill me now, honestly.”

“I thought he just didn’t want anyone to see him cry,” Charlie said, ﬁnally drying his eyes. “But on the topic of peeing and my favorite truck…,” he began.

“Don’t you dare.” Bel spun around to shoot him a look. Charlie giggled, ruﬄing her hair.

“Go on,” he said. “It’s cute.”

No, it was not cute, the very opposite. And there was an entire British ﬁlm crew here. Not to mention the camera.

Her dad poked her in the back. “I’ve already started now.”

Bel sighed, turned away. Well, ﬁne, if it cheered him up. But she wasn’t going to help him tell it.

“I loved that truck,” Charlie said to Ramsey, throwing himself right into the story, permission granted. “Would have kept it forever. But…Bel and I were in North Conway, can’t remember the reason now.”

Bel did. “We went to Story Land for my twelfth birthday.”

“Right,” Charlie said. “We stopped at Taco Bell on the drive home. I leave Bel in the truck while I go in to grab the food. And when I come back out, she’d wet herself all over the backseat.” He chuckled, telling the story with his hands too. “I mean everywhere. So much pee.”

“Uncle Charlie,” Carter said, voice chiding, dipping deeper with his name.

“You left me there for, like, three hours,” Bel protested, a heat in her cheeks that was worse than the story itself.

Charlie laughed harder. “It was ten minutes. Fifteen tops. Too many milkshakes at Story Land, I think, kiddo.” He leaned all the way forward, wrapping her in a bear hug from behind, an annoying number of kisses to the top of her head. “But we could never get the pee smell out. So that was the end of my beautiful truck, my ﬁrst drive as a free man.”

“RIP,” Bel grumbled. “Rest in pee?” he added.

Bel wouldn’t dignify that with an answer.

The sound of a toilet ﬂushing, Jeﬀ whistling as he walked back in. Deﬁnitely didn’t wash his hands, then. Carter sank even farther into the ﬂoor.

“Jeﬀ.” Ramsey stood up, voice as light and breezy as he could make it. “No big deal, but next time, could you wait until we aren’t in the middle of a segment to go to the toilet?”

“I really had to pee,” Jeﬀ said, retaking his place on the sofa.

“Oh, we know,” Ash muttered, replacing the headphones over his ears.

“I wanted to return to something Jeﬀ said about that clip,” Ramsey said. Then, somehow softening and raising his voice at the same time, he asked: “Patrick, do you remember why you didn’t want to go to the courthouse the day the verdict was read? Patrick?”

“What?” Grandpa croaked at his name.

“Were you nervous the verdict was going to be guilty?” “Who’s that?”

Charlie shifted on the sofa, moving closer to Grandpa. “Dad?” he said softly. “He’s asking you about the trial. Remember? About Rachel?”

“Rachel,” Grandpa said, choking over the sharp word, a cobweb of dried spit at the corner of his mouth. “Rachel. Charlie’s girlfriend.”

“Wife,” Charlie corrected him with a gentle smile. “It’s OK, take your time, Dad.” Charlie brought himself even closer, arm around Grandpa’s shoulders.

“Rachel,” he tried again. “Sh-she was, wasn’t she…stop it,” Grandpa spat suddenly, picking one hand up from his lap and ﬂinging it toward Charlie’s face. The slap made contact, just, a soft burst of violence before Charlie caught Grandpa’s hand, cupping it gently between his much bigger hands. Safe hands.

“It’s OK, Dad,” he whispered to him. “I’m here. You have nothing to worry about.”

“Jeﬀ?” Grandpa asked him. “No, it’s Charlie. I’m here.”

Yordan stood to attention at the back of the room.

“It’s OK,” Charlie said to him, glancing at Bel to tell her as well. And it was OK, if her dad said it was.

He turned his gaze to Ramsey. “Dad lost a lot of his memory when he had his ﬁrst stroke, last summer. It was a bad one. Been in a wheelchair since the second. He has vascular dementia, so he’s losing more of his working memory, his speech, old memories. He can get aggressive without meaning to.”

Ramsey probably knew all of this; her dad must have explained it already. Maybe he was saying it now for the camera, so people didn’t think

Grandpa was just mean.

“I think he’s lost most of the time that Rachel was with us. I’m not sure he even remembers the girls,” Charlie said sadly, refusing to look down at them.

Not remembering was a little like leaving.

“He doesn’t have those memories anymore. I’m not sure it’s fair of us to ask him about Rachel, it will only distress him.”

And maybe Bel was the only one who could truly understand that.

“Of course, I’m sorry,” Ramsey said. “I shouldn’t have. I thought I saw him smiling during the video. I’m sorry.”

“It’s OK.”

“Are we OK to carry on?”

And they were, because Dad said it, a small red mark growing on his cheek.

“This ﬁnal clip is an important one,” Ramsey said, zeroing in on Bel instead.

Great, her turn in the spotlight? She’d been trying to go unnoticed, which was not the same as disappeared. Sherry and Dad were easy shields.

“The reason this one is special,” Ramsey continued, “is because it might be the last-ever video of Rachel Price, other than the security footage from the White Mountains Mall. This video was taken, by Rachel, on February eleventh, 2008, two days before she disappeared.”

He let that hang in the air for a moment. “Here we go.”

He pressed play.

A close-up of a child in a yellow onesie, lying on the carpet, a gummy baby-tooth smile at the camera above. Bare chubby feet pressed together like thoughtful hands, waiting for something.

“Who’s the best girl in the world?” the voice behind the camera asked, soft and breathy and sure, like it already knew the answer. Familiar somehow too. One oversized hand reached down, coming from the sky to tickle the young child. She giggled, balling her little baby ﬁsts, spitting

bubbles as her happy tongue poked through. Freezing when the hand withdrew, like she only came alive at the touch. Tickled again.

“Are you a mommy’s girl?” the voice asked. The child squealed in response. “You are, aren’t you? You’re a mommy’s girl, Anna-Belly-Boo.”

“Ma-ma,” the child answered, stilted and bright. “Yes, Anna. You love your mama, huh?”

“Thess,” said the kid, conﬁdent it was a word. “Thess ah mama blong- itf.” Conﬁdent that that was a sentence.

“Yeah, good girl,” Rachel said, pretending to understand. “And Mommy loves you more than anything in the whole wide world. Doesn’t she?”

There was a sound, the soft crash of the front door closing, somewhere oﬀ camera.

“You’re here already,” Charlie’s voice, muﬄed in the background. “How did you get home?”

“Jules gave me a ride,” Rachel replied.

“I would have come get you,” he said. “Rachel, honey.” Closer now. “You didn’t shut the front door again. You really need to check, it’s freezing out. Aren’t you cold?”

“Not really,” she answered. “We’re not cold, are we, baby girl?” Young Annabel hitched up her feet, blowing another happy bubble. The clip ended.

Black screen.

Bel swallowed, a wad of thick saliva sticking in her throat. The room was silent, everyone waiting for her to say something.

“Yeah,” she said, which might as well have been nothing. “I hadn’t seen that before.” Saying something without saying anything. Bel turned back to the camera, catching Ash’s eyes on the way over. He gave her a small double thumbs-up, held tightly to his strawberry-covered chest. Urgh, he could shove those thumbs up his—

“What are you thinking, Bel?” Ramsey asked. “How does it make you feel, seeing that clip? Just two days before everything changed, forever.”

How did it make her feel? Uncomfortable, throat-swollen, sweaty- palmed.

“It’s nice,” she lied. “To see a normal moment like that. I don’t remember any with her. But I seemed happy there.”

“Yes, you did.” An encouraging smile on Ramsey’s face. “As did Rachel, I think. Very happy, no hint of the impending disaster. I got emotional when I ﬁrst saw it, I’ll admit,” he said, “because it’s just so clear how much your mum loved you.”

Did she? More than anything in the whole wide world? Well then, why did she leave Bel behind in the backseat of her car just forty-eight hours later? Disappeared forever. Explain that one.

“Another thing I couldn’t help but notice,” Ramsey continued. He couldn’t help noticing a lot, huh? Should see a doctor about that. “There’s the physical resemblance between you and Rachel, but the thing that gets me here, is how similar the two of you sound. Your voices when you speak are almost exactly the same.”

“Yeah, I noticed that,” Jeﬀ chimed in. “Really similar, now you’re all grown up. We’d probably get you two mixed up all the time on the phone if…”

Yeah, if…

Bel’s intuition was correct. The familiarity of Rachel’s voice wasn’t from memories—she had none. As Ramsey awaited her response, Bel hesitated, reluctant to speak in Rachel’s voice again.

Ramsey shifted his focus to her father. “Charlie, there’s another aspect from that clip we’d like to discuss. During your trial in December 2008, you testified that Rachel’s behavior changed in the months before her disappearance. You described her as becoming forgetful, preoccupied, and distracted. Could you elaborate on that?”

Charlie straightened, the old sofa groaning beneath him. “It wasn’t anything major. Just small things, like what you saw with the front door. Rachel started forgetting things she normally wouldn’t. She’d leave the oven on, burn food, forget Bel in the bathtub. It was always something—the stove, faucets, windows, baby monitor. I chalked it up to ‘baby brain.’ Maybe returning to work, even part-time, was too soon. I’m certain that’s all it was.”

Bel shifted uncomfortably on the hard floor. She wasn’t as convinced as her father. Leaving the front door ajar unintentionally, forgetting to turn off the shower, neglecting to seal the trash can during black bear season despite knowing better—these were all things she’d done. Her father had always been understanding, perhaps too much so. Had he noticed the parallels? He’d never mentioned it, which was a relief. Bel had no desire to emulate Rachel Price. If Rachel illuminated rooms, Bel would cast shadows. If Rachel was forgetful, Bel would strive to be the opposite

“And Bel,” Ramsey said, “I know it’s been sixteen years, and you think your mum is most likely dead. But if she did, somehow, come back after all this time, what would you want to say to her?”

Bel didn’t even know how to begin to answer that. And that was ﬁne, she didn’t owe Ramsey everything in her head. She could keep some back for herself. “I don’t know, I didn’t really know her.”

“I know,” Charlie said, stepping in, saving her. “I’ve thought about it a lot, have dreams about it, even. I would just want to hold her. Wrap my arms around her and just tell her how much I love her. How much I’ve missed her. Before any questions, those can come later.”

Sherry blew her nose, loudly.

“You OK, honey?” Jeﬀ asked her. She waved him oﬀ.

“It won’t ever happen, I know that,” Charlie said, voice splitting in two, catching the tears before they fell. “But that’s what I’d do.”