Chapter Three

It was an afternoon for premonitions. The first came after work, as Katie drove out of the school grounds and saw her brother for the first time in two years.

He was sitting on a bench just outside the main entrance: a disheveled figure with his head bowed and long hair trailing down, dressed in old jeans and a stained jacket that he was pulling tightly around himself. Katie's heart started beating faster when she spotted him. The encounter had come out of nowhere, and there was no time to be sure what she was feeling. A part of her longed to see Chris again, but she was also frightened of why he had come back after all this time, and what he might want.

She slowed the car down as she reached him.

Chris noticed her approaching and looked up. But then she met his eyes through the window and immediately turned her head away and sped up again. Not Chris at all. Just another young homeless man. Even after two years, she would have recognized her brother immediately. However much he might have changed in that time, there would have been no mistaking the scar that ran down the side of his jaw.

Calm down, Katie.

If you're going to do this, then focus.

She turned the steering wheel carefully, breathing slowly to steady herself. She had the address of the house she was heading to, but she didn't know that part of the city well and had to rely on the GPS on the dashboard. In a strange way, that took some of the pressure off. It meant she didn't need to think about the fact she probably shouldn't be doing this. Instead, she could dutifully follow the blue line on the screen, as though the start and end points of her journey had been defined for her, and driving the route between was inevitable and beyond her control.

Even so, the nerves returned as she neared her destination.

You shouldn't be here.

She parked up outside a semidetached house on a nondescript street. Most of the properties here had seen better days, but the area itself was neither rich nor poor, and there was certainly nothing to single out this house in particular. It was a home you would drive past without noticing. And she supposed that, on one level, that was one reason she had come here.

She got out of the car and shivered a little. After an endlessly oppressive summer, the air the past few weeks had become colder and sharper. Every morning, the trees were a little barer, the sidewalks carpeted with more and more fallen leaves. Right now, the sun was bright and the breeze mild, but there was a wistfulness to both, as though even if the year wasn't dying quite yet it had accepted it was going to.

She walked to the door and rang the bell.

A woman answered a minute or so later. Her graying hair was tied back in a loose ponytail, and she was wearing a pale blue outfit. Katie wasn't sure if she had just come back from work or was about to head out. But then she registered the weariness on the woman's face and reminded herself it could be both.

"Mrs. Field?" she said.

"Yes."

"Nice to meet you." Katie smiled. "My name's Katie Shaw. I'm your son's teacher."

The smile wasn't returned. Instead, Mrs. Field folded her arms and leaned against the doorframe, looking even more tired now than she had a moment ago: a woman working two jobs who was about to be given a third.

"What's he done now?"

"It's not what he's done," she said. "It's that Gareth has missed several days of school already this term, and he was absent again this morning."

Mrs. Field blinked and then looked away to one side. Katie could almost see the calculations that were running through the woman's head. She hadn't been aware of what Katie had just told her, but she was also wondering how to make this new problem she'd been presented with go away as quickly and painlessly as possible. A moment later, she looked back at Katie.

"Yeah, that's right. Gareth was off sick today."

"Nobody called the office."

Mrs. Field shrugged. "It was busy this morning."

Katie was sure it had been, and that with everything else Mrs. Field had to deal with she was doing the best she could. But it was also clear the woman had no idea where her son had been today.

"I think it's important," Katie said. "I'm concerned about Gareth. He was already showing signs of falling behind the other students last year. If these absences continue, I'm worried he's going to struggle. I really don't want that to happen."

Mrs. Field snorted slightly.

"Yeah, that would make the school look bad, right?"

"No, that's not it at all. I'm thinking of your son."

"Oh, so you're saying I'm not?"

Katie started to reply but forced herself to stop. Deep down, she recognized that Mrs. Field was lashing out at her as a form of defense, and it was important not to respond in kind. Instead, she tried to picture what Mrs. Field was seeing right now: this smartly dressed, younger woman who had arrived on her doorstep, smiling, pretending to act friendly even as she stuck the knife in.

"That's honestly not what I think at all," Katie said. "I am absolutely sure you care very deeply about your son. But like I said, I'm concerned too. I don't want him to slip through the cracks."

"It's always the same with you people, isn't it? All targets. All box-ticking. It's not like Gareth has ever done well at school anyway."

Which was true, Katie thought. From his academic record, there was nothing exceptional about Gareth Field at all. In his own way, he was just as average as this house, this street, this whole area. But that was the point. It wasn't the special kids you needed to hold a hand out to. It wasn't the terrible kids either. It was whichever ones you saw falling.

"I know it's hard," Katie said. "I know what teenagers are like."

"Do you?"

"Yes."

Mrs. Field looked her up and down and then snorted again. Katie supposed it was understandable; she was in her early thirties and didn't look old enough to have a child that age. But then she pictured Gareth Field in her mind's eye—not a troublemaker; just a lonely boy, slight and timid, isolated from the other children in his class—and the image segued into memories of Chris back when he had been a teenager. The way she would see her brother walking along the school corridors by himself, always slightly hunched over, as though he were holding something close to his chest that other people might try to break.

And which someone eventually had.

"Yes," Katie said again. "I really do."

I know how people can be lost.

I know how people can get hurt if you let them.

But Mrs. Field didn't reply.

"Let me know if there's anything I can do to help," Katie said. "Please."

Then she turned and walked away. She had tried to do what she could. Maybe her words would make a difference—that was all she could hope for. But when she reached the car and glanced behind her, she saw the front door was already closed.

When Katie got back home, she was greeted by the sight of Siena, her three-and-a-half-year-old daughter, sitting on the couch, her little feet poking off the edge. As always, Siena was draped in her flag. The television was on, and she was so engrossed in whatever cartoon it was showing that she didn't even glance up. Katie looked around the living room, then leaned on one foot and peered through into the kitchen.

Sam was nowhere to be seen.

She could hear the faint sound of music beating somewhere below her feet.

Keep calm, she told herself.

She's fine.

She shrugged her bag off her shoulder, fighting off the panic in the back of her mind, and then kept her tone even.

"Hey there, Snail," she said. "Remember me?"

"Mommy!"

Siena got up and toddled over to her, the flag pulled over her shoulders like a cape, and then offered a gentle cuddle that Katie knelt down gratefully to accept.

"Daddy downstairs?" Katie said.

"Yes."

"And have you been good for him since home time?"

"No."

Katie ruffled her soft hair. "Good."

She stood up and headed through to the kitchen, and then to the door that led down to the basement.

She and Sam had fallen in love with their cottage the first time they'd laid eyes on it. It had been at the end of a long month of house hunting, and the real estate agent had brought them to the property with the manner of someone showing a prospective owner the last and most hopeless dog in the pound. The cottage had been small and cramped, the walls speckled with mold, the paint flecked, the wallpaper peeling. It had smelled damp, and it had felt it too.

But as they looked around, Katie found she gradually stopped noticing the many things that were wrong with it and began focusing instead on the things that felt right. The exposed wooden beams in the front-room ceiling. The layout of the rooms. The way in which she could—almost without trying—already furnish the spaces in front of her. Bookcases here; a couch there; the bed like that with the dressers opposite. It was the strangest feeling, as though a future version of her knew this place by heart, but the her right then hadn't yet reached that point in time.

She and Sam spent the next two years renovating it, doing the work themselves when they could and stretching their budget on a monthly basis when they needed help. Ever so slowly, it had become not just a house but a home. And it turned out that everything had fit exactly where she'd imagined it would. Where both of them had.

For Sam, that meant the basement.

The music grew louder as she opened the door and headed down the stone steps. The basement was the size of the living room above, but even that was barely enough space to contain the equipment her husband had amassed over the years. There were guitars and bass guitars stored upright in a cluster of stands by one wall. A drum kit in one corner. Racks of the headphones he used for his silent discos. A keyboard that seemed longer than the average human being. The floor was a swirl of foot pedals and cables, the latter concentrated around a table covered with computer equipment, where Sam was standing right now.

He had his back to her and was staring intently at one of the screens. From what she could see of the detail there, it might have been monitoring the vital signs of a whole hospital ward.

"Hey," she said.

"Hey."

Sam pressed a button and the music stopped.

"Listen," Katie said, "I don't know if you remember, but we have a child?" She held her palm out at waist height. "Little person, about this tall? Arrived a few years ago now, I guess, but the occasion was reasonably memorable."

She tried to keep her tone lighthearted, but inside she was seething. Siena was fine, and she knew she was worrying needlessly, but that did nothing to still the alarm sounding in the back of her mind. Sam had been down here and Siena had been up there, and that meant she had not been safe. Because that was the way the world worked. You couldn't make assumptions and take chances. You didn't know when bad things were going to happen until they already had, and by then it was too late.

Sam turned around and smiled. Despite herself, the cold feeling inside her melted slightly. Whenever he smiled like that, she felt the time dropping away. His hair hadn't changed over the years, and his smile made him look so much like the carefree teenage boy she'd fallen in love with that it was often hard to remain angry.

"But she's fine, right?" Sam said.

Katie folded her arms. "Well, she was watching television."

"Television is very educational these days." He checked his watch. "And I needed to sort this. You're back later than usual."

"I went to one of my kids' houses on the way home."

"How come?"

"You remember me telling you about Gareth Field? He wasn't in school again today, so I decided to talk to his mother."

Sam frowned. "I don't know how these things work, but are you actually allowed to do that?"

"Allowed to look up the address on the school computer system and call around at the house unannounced? No, not really."

"Could you get in trouble for it?"

"Possibly," she said. "Time will tell."

"Time does do that, yes."

Sam was silent for a moment.

Then he sighed.

"You can't help everyone," he said quietly. "You're not responsible for everyone. You do know that, don't you?"

Katie didn't reply, and for a few seconds the atmosphere in the basement felt awkward. Then she heard Siena calling from upstairs.

"Mommy? Daddy?"

The sound broke the slight tension in the air. She looked up at the ceiling for a moment, then back down at Sam as his eyes widened in pretend shock.

"Shit," he said. "I remember now."

Once back upstairs—and with the television firmly off—Katie sat next to Siena on the couch, reading with her. This was one of her favorite parts of the day, snuggled up tightly beside her daughter. The book in front of them was already far too young for Siena; it had big pages with simple illustrations and the corresponding words written underneath them. But Siena had always loved it, which meant Katie loved it too.

"Sun."

Siena pointed at the right drawing.

"That's right," Katie said.

"And moon."

Siena giggled at that: a gorgeous sound that made Katie smile. On this particular page, Siena always left that image until last. She and Sam had told her it was the first word she ever said, and since then the moon had been magic to Siena. Every night, she insisted on saying good night to it.

Katie turned the page.

Siena pointed. "Van."

"That's the one."

"Helicopter."

"You're a genius, kid."

As her daughter continued pointing and naming the illustrations, Katie allowed her mind to wander, thinking back to what Sam had said to her downstairs. You can't help everyone. The two of them had fallen in love as teenagers and been together ever since, so he knew her well—far too well sometimes. But what he'd said was right, and she needed to remind herself of it more often. At the same time, knowing it was true never did anything to dispel the urge to help, or to soften the sense of guilt she felt when she failed.

And as her mind wandered, the second premonition arrived.

"Red car," Siena said.

Katie blinked, snapping back into focus, and looked down at the page. There was a picture of a car there, but it was blue.

"What do you mean?" Katie said slowly.

"Red car, Mommy."

Her heart fluttered in her chest, and a trickle of cold ran down her spine.

Red car.

"What—?"

But then she heard a buzzing sound. Her phone ringing—over on the table. She stood up and walked across, shivering slightly, caught off-balance.

She registered the number on the screen and answered the call.

"Mom?"

"Katie?"

Her mother sounded disorientated. Upset. Which frightened Katie, because weakness had always been the very last thing her mother would show the world.

Something terrible has happened.

"It's me, Mom. What's wrong?"

For a second, there was no reply. Just a hiss of static on the line.

"It's Chris," her mother said softly. "It's your brother."