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.
They had exchanged something in the order of eleven hundred messages. He had persuaded her, over those four months, of a number of things about her family, and the pattern is textbook and I have since read about forty pages on it.
There was an arrangement for the Saturday.
Breen told me this in my own front room in a calm voice and gave me a folder, and I told her she was wrong.
I told her that my daughter told me everything. I told her Neve would not do that. I said the word impossible and I said it more than once.
And then I went on regional television eleven days later and said, to camera, that my daughter had been taken off that beach by a stranger.
I said it again in 2018. And in 2019.
Every appeal that went out for eight years described an abduction, because that is what her mother insisted on and because a mother’s word carries in those appeals.
Odalys Breen never publicly contradicted me. She has told me since that she should have.
And my own mother sat in a hall in 2019 and tried to say it out loud, and I took the microphone off her.
I was not protecting Neve.
I was protecting myself from the four months I did not see.
