‘Yes, he’s on pretty serious meds,’ I confirm now. ‘But he should still be compos mentis. Just a bit slower than usual, is all.’
We are both silent, thinking about the baby who wasn’t loved enough to be called by his name, the little boy Kowalsky and Oppenheimer decided was balanced enough that a new start could paper over the cracks his mistreatment had left in his psyche.
‘Oh my God, someone’s coming.’
Shannon is half standing, unsure what to do with herself. I hear her swallow loudly. My own mouth is dry as dust, remembering the solemn-faced child I glimpsed through a panel of glass all those years ago.
The door opens and a prison guard steps inside wearing a dark-blue uniform and a stern expression. He glances at me, then at Shannon. And then at Shannon again.
‘I’ll be outside,’ he tells her. It’s as if I don’t exist.
Then he turns to go and someone else is coming through the door. Someone tall who looks at me through Shannon’s eyes as if he recognizes me. As the door softly closes behind him, he shifts his attention to Shannon and they stare at each other for a long time. I notice that Ewan Johnson has lost the chest-out stance of the photographs in Sheila and Neil’s home. His shoulders are still broad but he is thinner than he appeared on the news bulletins, his sweatshirt hanging off him as if off a clothes hanger. I have never seen anyone look so lost.
I think about what he endured in that basement. I think about the cage. I think about how he was three years old before he heard a kind word or felt a gentle human touch. And I think about the little girl who grew up aware she was doing something wrong, something bad, but not knowing exactly what or how to stop it. I think about my own mother and how she chose the liquor over me, and just how many ways it’s possible to fuck up a child so badly that ten, twenty, forty years later they’re still trying to make sense of it.
And now Shannon is properly on her feet and taking two steps across the floor and she’s opening up her arms, and her brother is falling into them like the baby he was never allowed to be.
And for this moment, just for this moment, love is all. Love is everything.
I close my eyes.
Epilogue
Julia Tomlinson-Harris had that fluttery feeling she got whenever she was nervous or excited or, as now, a mixture of both. Though there were several files open on the desk in front of her, her mind wasn’t on the reports she was supposed to be reading; instead, her gaze flicked repeatedly to the glass window between her new office and the desks on the main floor where sat the staff members she’d inherited.
She’d met them when she first came in that morning, but only briefly. Mark Hamilton had brought her into the main office and gathered the staff together to introduce her and make a quick speech.
The words ‘unfortunate’, ‘regrettable’ and ‘tragic’ had featured strongly in the first part of the speech, to be quickly replaced by ‘overcome’, ‘pull together’ and once even, if she remembered rightly, ‘transcend’. They were entering an exciting period, Mark informed them. ‘The future starts now.’ Then she’d shaken hands with each of the staff members and they’d told her their names, which she knew anyway from the personnel records she’d studied in depth. And since then she’d been in here, pretending to work, but really trying to get a handle on who they all were and to gauge the general mood.
That grim-faced man over there must be Charlie. Not terribly friendly, was he? Looked like he had the world on his shoulders. But then hadn’t he had some sort of breakdown on the very same day of what Mark kept referring to as ‘the unfortunate tragedy’? Slashed his own arm? Not deeply, thank the Lord, but enough to have everyone flapping about for a while. That was one of the reasons they hadn’t noticed the other two had been gone so long apparently.
‘Aren’t you a bit freaked out, going into that office? After everything that happened?’ her old assistant Naomi had asked Julia after she first announced her new job.
‘It didn’t happen in the office itself,’ Julia had reminded her. ‘And obviously Ewan Johnson isn’t there any more.’
‘Yes, but it’s kind of like stepping into a dead woman’s shoes, isn’t it? Kind of creepy.’ And she’d done a theatrical little shudder so that her narrow brown shoulders moved up and down like piano keys under her strappy top.
Julia actually hadn’t felt at all freaked out when Mark Hamilton had first approached her about taking over Rachel Masters’s job. In fact, she’d been flattered. With all the media reports both at the time of the incident and then again at the trial, this was by far the most high-profile recruitment department in the country – and she was the one tasked with getting it back into shape.