The Boy in the Photo Read online

  The Boy in the Photo

  An absolutely gripping and emotional page-turner

  Nicole Trope

  Books by Nicole Trope

  My Daughter’s Secret

  The Boy in the Photo

  Available in Audio

  My Daughter’s Secret (UK listeners | US listeners)

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Epilogue

  My Daughter’s Secret

  Hear More from Nicole

  Books by Nicole Trope

  A Letter from Nicole

  Acknowledgements

  For D.M.I and J

  Prologue

  She can feel the blood rushing through her veins. The incessant thudding of her heart in her ears drowns out all other sounds, and her chest heaves as she tries to get enough air inside her. She is running now, running with no real purpose, no idea where exactly she is trying to get to – just running. The space is too big, too filled with locked doors, hidden corners and lurking shadows. There are too many places he could be. How could this safe space have suddenly turned so vast and threatening? Why does nothing look familiar?

  Her breath comes in pants, faster and faster. Panic has taken hold. Sweat trickles down her back. Her legs start to ache.

  She knew this would happen, didn’t she? She tried to dismiss it, to talk herself out of it, but she knew. She knew.

  Where is he?

  Where is he?

  Where is he?

  One

  When the call comes Megan is trying – and failing – to feed her daughter. There is rice cereal on the tray of the high chair, rice cereal all over Evie’s face and rice cereal on Megan’s hands; but so far none of it seems to have been swallowed by Evie, whose little tongue pokes out indignantly every time the spoon comes anywhere near her mouth.

  ‘I give up, baby girl,’ says Megan, laughing as she wipes her daughter’s face.

  Evie smiles at her.

  Megan’s phone starts ringing, and she glances down, seeing it’s Michael. A rare middle-of-the-day call.

  ‘Hey, babe, what’s up?’ she asks as she lifts Evie out of the high chair and puts her on the floor on her back. Evie immediately flips over and begins trying to get up on her hands and knees.

  ‘Megan, they found him,’ says Michael, dispensing with the pleasantry of ‘hello’.

  ‘Found who?’ she asks, watching Evie rock back and forth in the crawling position. She is only days away from being able to move, keen to put babyhood behind her despite being only six months old.

  Megan assumes that Michael must be talking about someone from one of his latest cases. Mostly shrouded in secrecy, they are sometimes mentioned over dinner when some of the information is already out in the wide world for speculation and horror. She finds the stories he tells painful to hear but she feels she must listen. She must give the heartbreak of others her attention. Her own pain has strengthened her ability to empathise with those who find their lives shattered in an instant and dwarfed by grief. But he has never called to update her during the day, preferring to talk to her over dinner, use her as a sounding board.

  The news is on the television and Megan glances at the screen, where a picture of a young man flashes and words scroll beneath his genial face: missing backpacker Steven Hindley from England. Megan looks around for the remote so she can turn up the sound in case this is the person Michael is talking about, and she experiences a flash of alarm that someone so young may have met a terrible end. She watches as a young woman with short pink hair tells a reporter, ‘He, like, loved Newcastle, you know, said he wanted to visit every part of New South Wales. He said he wanted to go to a rave here. Maybe he’s just back in Sydney and hasn’t contacted anyone.’

  Megan turns down the sound. Newcastle is not Michael’s jurisdiction. Michael doesn’t work missing persons anyway, not anymore.

  ‘They found…’ says Michael and then he stops.

  Megan runs through their conversation last night, imagining her tall, broad-shouldered husband at his desk, tapping his pencil to make the rat-a-tat, rat-a-tat sound. The sound signals anxiety, signals the fact that he feels a little out of control.

  It could be an old case. Despite now working with serious crimes, he still looks into his old missing persons cases when he can. Closure brings him relief, regardless of the outcome. It could be one of the cases he’s working on now. They discussed a woman whose husband beat her up and left her for dead, and one about a driver who hit an old man then left him to die.

  She becomes aware of the silence at the other end of the phone, and without the slightest warning, a prickling sensation crawls up her arms. Her heart rate speeds up. Her breathing accelerates like it does when she’s running.

  ‘Found who?’ she asks again, slowly, carefully, deliberately repeating the words.

  ‘Daniel,’ says Michael. ‘They found Daniel.’

  Two

  Six Years Ago, Monday 20 May 2013

  Megan slaps at the alarm clock, hitting it off her bedside table, stopping it from letting her

  know that she has, once again, hit the snooze button. She grabs her phone from the side of the bed and peers blearily at the screen. It’s only seven twenty. Not as late as she thought, but late enough.

  She curls herself into a ball, groans a little and finally flings back the covers and leaps to her feet.

  She can hear the television is on; morning cartoons blare around the small apartment, bouncing off the walls. Too much wine last night. Too much lonely always leads to too much wine. She knows she will eventually get used to the late-night silence that pervades the apartment, and maybe even learn to enjoy it, but last night it had made her feel trapped and intently aware of her separateness from the rest of the world. The wine had helped. One glass had made her feel better, two glasses had made her feel optimistic about the future, three had made the comedy on television hilarious and then, without her noticing, the bottle was done.

  ‘All I want to do is love you, Megan. Is that too much to ask?’ She hears the words he spat into her ear, his fingers bruising her jaw. Pushing aside the memory, she washes her face, acknowledging that a lonely bottle of wine and a thumping headache are easier to deal with than her ex-husband Greg’s suffocating, obsessive, controlling company. His version of love cannot be recovered from with some paracetamol, washed down by a cup of strong, bitter coffee and a litre of water.

  ‘Daniel, turn that down,’ she shouts as she grabs tracksuit pants and a warm jumper from the wardrobe, suitable for the school run. It’s not like she’ll get out of the car anyway. She can’t bear to face all the mothers, not when she’s feeling like this.

  A quick glance
in the mirror makes her wince. The circles under her eyes are dark enough to look like bruises. She really needs to drink more water, start exercising and generally get her life together. She shakes her head at herself. ‘You’re doing okay,’ she whispers to her reflection, and she’s immediately cheered by the way her brown eyes light up a little. She pulls her long, curly, black hair into a ponytail and smiles at herself. ‘You’re doing okay.’

  The affirmations, recommended by a website filled with advice for people going through divorce, made her feel stupid in the beginning, but on days when she questions what has happened to her life, what has happened to her, they help. They really do.

  In the living room, six-year-old Daniel is dressed in his sports pants. Bare-chested, his ribs protrude, fighting with his collarbones for angles in almost comical opposition to his chubby cheeks. He is slumped on the couch, spooning cereal into his mouth. How can someone who never stops eating be this skinny? I should look into supplements, Megan thinks as she appraises her son.

  ‘I can’t find my school sports top.’ Daniel doesn’t take his eyes off the television, where a talking dog is flying through space.

  Megan tears around the apartment, looking under the couches and in the bedrooms, opening the washing machine and tumble dryer and finally finding the top, neatly folded on top of the clean laundry. ‘Daniel, it’s sitting right here. If it was a snake, it would have bitten you.’

  ‘But it’s not a snake, Mum, it’s my sports top.’ He grins. Four missing front teeth, but still beautiful. A rush of love fills her and she kisses each chubby cheek. ‘I’m watching, Mum,’ he protests.

  ‘Sorry, here, lean forward and put down the cereal for a second.’ Megan pulls the top over his head and he obediently threads his arms through. ‘Now go and find your tracksuit top, will you?’

  ‘I’m sitting on it. Now you have to pack my lunch.’

  ‘I know, Daniel, I’m getting a little tired of you telling me what to do,’ she snaps, instantly regretting it. How can my mood change this quickly? I’m doing okay, I’m doing okay.

  She takes a deep breath. ‘I mean, I know, baby. I know what I have to do to get you ready for school.’

  Annie, the school psychologist, says he keeps telling her what to do because he needs to feel he’s in control of something.

  ‘It’s a coping mechanism. Divorce can make children feel very insecure,’ the earnest young woman had reported to Megan. ‘Daniel is a sensitive child who needs to feel that he can manage this change. He’s not being rude, he’s just making sure you aren’t late or don’t forget something.’

  ‘I understand, I do,’ Megan had replied. ‘But sometimes it feels like he’s trying to mother me. I’m struggling to feel in control of my own life too, and being told what to do by a six-year-old only heightens that.’

  ‘This must be very hard for both of you,’ Annie had said, focusing her sympathetic gaze on Megan, who found herself tearing up at the psychologist’s kindness.

  ‘Yes… it’s been… just horrible.’

  ‘Does Daniel get along with his father?’

  ‘They do, I mean, sort of. It’s funny to see them together because they both have the same curly brown hair and hazel eyes, like carbon copies on the outside, but inside they couldn’t be more different. Greg was always…’ Megan had paused. She hadn’t wanted to say ‘a bully’ because she hadn’t wanted to paint that picture for the psychologist.

  She finds this juxtaposition of thoughts about her ex-husband difficult to deal with. She would like to announce his sins to the world but she’s acutely aware that as Daniel’s father, he needs to be spoken of carefully to protect her son. How she sees Greg isn’t how Daniel sees him. She wouldn’t want Daniel to see his father like that.

  To her, Greg is a bully, an emotionally – and sometimes physically – abusive man, a nightmare of an ex-husband. To Daniel he is a hero, a joker, a friend to play with.

  ‘Greg was always the loud kid at school, the sporty one, you know,’ she had explained to the psychologist. ‘He had lots of friends and he played for every team. Daniel is more like me: quiet and he’s very artistic.’

  ‘Oh, I know, I’ve seen his paintings hanging in the hall at our art shows. You teach art, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes, although I haven’t had much time to do my own work lately. But hopefully sometime soon.’

  Annie had leaned across the desk, covering Megan’s hand with her own slightly rough one. ‘I’m sure you’ll get back to it very soon. You and Daniel are going to be just fine.’

  Megan had been oddly grateful for the words. From a stranger, they seemed to carry more weight than from her mother or her brother, Connor, or his husband James.

  ‘Everything is packed and ready,’ says Megan, remembering the psychologist’s platitudes. ‘Are you ready for a great school day?’

  ‘Ready!’ shouts Daniel.

  At the school drop-off she gets out of the car, just long enough to hug Daniel.

  He grins up at her. ‘Have a good day, Mum, enjoy your art stuff… Look, there’s Max, Max, Maxie,’ he calls and he runs off without looking back.

  ‘Love you,’ shouts Megan to his back. Three children turn around. She could be speaking to any one of them. She spots Olivia, Max’s mum, who gives her a thumbs up and holds her hand up to her face, miming ‘call me’ as she pulls away from the drop-off zone.

  Back at home, Megan tidies and sips coffee as she gets ready for work. She’s starting the day with a new class of people from the aged care home. Megan loves these art classes. They are all so supportive of each other, all so excited to be there. There’s no competition, no comparisons. They are all past that, at an age where merely being alive is cause for celebration. They are joyous to be around.

  Her hours at the art studio pass quickly, and over lunch she gives silent thanks for Mr Pietro and his support. When he’d first heard her news he had said, ‘As many classes as you want, my darling, you just tell me. Divorce is a terrible thing, but sometimes to stay married is even more terrible.’

  She had loved Mr Pietro in that moment, loved him for understanding without her needing to explain just how hideous things had become.

  Her boss had never indicated that he was aware of what was going on at home, but sometimes he would bring a cup of tea into her studio and say, ‘I thought something hot and soothing would be nice. I think this morning was, perhaps, not that good a morning.’

  ‘Oh no, I love my classes,’ she would reply quickly, panicked that he thought she wasn’t happy in her job. It was, after all, the place where she could forget that she had been labelled a whore over breakfast for wearing red lipstick.

  ‘I mean this morning at home, Megan,’ he would reply quietly, taking off his little round glasses and polishing them. Even though she wanted to tell him he was wrong, it had been easier, on days like that, to simply nod her head.

  At the end of the day she stands outside the school, watching the primary-school students tumble out of classrooms, laughing and talking, greeting parents with enthusiastic hugs as though they have been apart for years. Even at three thirty, the light has already started to change as they see out the last month of autumn. Megan wonders how her first winter in the flat where she and Daniel have had to move will go when it’s dark by five o’clock in the afternoon. She worries about feeling claustrophobic in the small, stifling space after having had the vast expanse of her garden to enjoy.

  ‘Megs, over here,’ she hears. Olivia is dressed for court with her hair tightly wound in a bun and wearing a pants suit that only seems to accentuate how small she is.

  ‘I thought you’d be in court all day?’

  ‘Nope, the whole thing degenerated into complete chaos with the husband swearing at the wife and the wife’s mother standing up and threatening to kill him, so it was all adjourned with stern instructions from the judge for everyone to learn how to behave. Honestly, you would think it was an episode of Suits the way these two are acting.’

/>   ‘I wish you could tell me who they are.’

  Olivia brushes her fingers across her lips. ‘No way, Megs. It’s all strictly confidential, but you would have seen their photos in all the tabloids. Anyway, the good news is that I get to pick up Max. Roy wants to take us out to dinner.’

  ‘Lucky you. Celebrating something?’

  Olivia looks down at her high-heeled boots and her face clouds. ‘We’re going to start trying IVF.’

  ‘Oh, babe, I’m so sorry you have to, but it’s a good thing, right? You’ll be pregnant in no time and complaining about back pain and nausea.’

  ‘I guess,’ agrees Olivia. She looks up at Megan. ‘The two of us, hey? We really need a few good months.’

  ‘If Greg would just stop emailing and texting me constantly, I would be happy.’

  ‘He still doing that?’

  ‘Yep. Still hoping I’ll come back to him. It’s been two months since we signed the parental orders and finished mediation. I thought he would have given up by now but he keeps telling me how much he’s always loved me, how much I’ve hurt him, how I don’t deserve to have a child because I’ve broken our family, and the latest is, “You’ll know this pain one day.” I know it’s all just idle threats but it still gets to me.’ The words emerge with a flippancy that Megan does not feel.