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.
PART 4 — ILSE
The woman on that terrace is Ilse Warrender and she is fifty-eight and she runs a laundry on the front at Portmell.
In 2017 she owned a flat above it and she let it to a man of thirty-one.
For about ten months she thought he had a girlfriend who did not go out.
In the May of 2018 she went up about a leak and there was a girl of seventeen in that flat, and Ilse Warrender is not a stupid woman and she understood it in about four seconds.
She got her out that week.
And then she did the thing that she has not slept properly over since.
She did not ring the police.
Because Neve, at seventeen, on Ilse’s sofa, begged her not to. Because ten months of that man had left a child who was certain — completely, immovably certain — that her family had stopped looking after about three weeks and that going back was not a thing that existed.
And Ilse Warrender was fifty and had never had children and made a decision on her own kitchen floor at two in the morning, and she has told me she got it wrong and I have told her she did and we have both left it there.
She took her in. She has had her since.
The man left Portmell in 2018. He is not in this story again and I am not going to write about him, because there is a live file and because he is the least interesting thing in it.
Neve is twenty-four. She works three days a week in a garden centre outside Portmell. She has a flat. She has a dog.
She did not know she was being looked for.
For eight years a young woman lived six hundred miles from her mother and believed she had been let go.
