My sixteen-year-old walked down a crowded beach to the ice cream stand and never came back. Eight years later, six hundred miles away, the wind lifted the hem of a stranger’s faded turquoise cover-up and I saw my mother’s crooked yellow sun stitched over the tear.
Marta Lennox was seventy-four and she had sewn that cover-up and she had not spoken at any of the previous ones, and I should have understood what it meant that she wanted to.
She got up and took the microphone and she got about eleven words in.
She said, “There are things on that laptop that this family hasn’t—”
And I came across that hall and took the microphone out of my mother’s hand.
I did it in front of thirty people. A woman from the paper. Two officers standing at the back. Neve’s two closest friends from school.
And I said:
“Give me that, Mum. Nobody’s hearing that tonight. My daughter was taken off a beach. Sit down.”
The hall went completely quiet.
Nobody said one word.
My mother sat down in the front row with her hands in her lap and did not look at me for the rest of the evening.
She never raised it again. Not once, in four years.
She died in the March of 2021 and the last conversation we ever had was about a hospital car park.
PART 3 — WHAT WAS ON THE LAPTOP
In the November of 2017, four months after the beach, Detective Odalys Breen sat in my front room and told me what the digital unit had found.
For four months before that trip, Neve had been in contact with a man of thirty-one.
Not on the platforms I checked. On one I had never heard of, through a group about a band she liked.
