The Nowhere Girl (ARC) Read online

  ‘Stay right where you are,’ she whispers, stroking her stomach and then cursing herself for letting her deepest desires get the better of her yet again.

  Back in bed she pushes herself up against Peter, but he rolls away from her and curls into a ball. She finds her cheeks wet and realises that she is crying silent tears. She was so alone on the long stretch of road. A great emptiness opens up inside her and she curls herself around a pillow, willing the tears to stop.

  ‘Go to sleep, little one,’ she hears and almost immediately she feels peaceful and safe. Sleep descends. She has never heard the words before, and just before she drops into a heavy slumber she wonders where they have come from.

  The next morning, she and Peter share breakfast as they discuss the briskly cold weather, Peter’s clients, what to have for dinner. Anything but the pregnancy.

  Finally, Peter is ready to go. ‘I know you don’t want to talk about it. I get it, I really do, but it’s killing me. I have to know what’s going on. I feel like this may be the one.’

  ‘Oh, babe,’ says Molly, grabbing him around his waist and resting her head on his chest. ‘I promise you that I’ll let you know if there’s anything to know. So far nothing’s happened.’

  ‘I know but you haven’t even told me what Dr Bernstein said.’

  Molly thinks about keeping up the lie, but it makes her want to wriggle out of her skin. ‘I… I haven’t been to see him.’

  ‘What?’ demands Peter, his face darkening with a rare show of anger. ‘You said you had seen him. You lied to me? How could you lie to me like that? That’s not who we are. It’s not what we do. I’m invested in this too, it’s unfair to shut me out.’

  ‘I know.’ Molly twists away from him and steps back. ‘I know, but I just couldn’t do it, Pete. I don’t want him to tell me there’s no heartbeat or that the heartbeat is slow or that my hormone levels are too low. I don’t want to hear any of it because I know it’s coming and that the end is inevitable, but I don’t want to think about it. I don’t want to think about it at all.’

  ‘Molly… sweetheart. You know that thinking about it isn’t going to change what’s going to happen. You need to see a doctor. You’re what now? Eight weeks?’

  ‘Nine,’ says Molly, ‘and it’s always over by ten. I thought I would wait until then, and what difference does it make if I do? If it’s going to happen, it’s going to happen, and there’s nothing I can do to stop it. I promise you that I’ll go next week if there have been no… no signs that it’s over.’

  ‘Okay, okay. I don’t want you to get upset.’ Peter sighs, picks up his briefcase and plants a kiss on her cheek before he leaves for work. Molly can see he is full of questions but knows to keep quiet. It’s part of his nature to understand when silence is needed. It’s one of the reasons she fell in love with him.

  Before Peter she had found herself dating men who always seemed full of opinions on what she should do with her life, how she should dress, what she should think.

  ‘I’m tired of dating men who think I need to be rescued and told what to do,’ she told Lexie years ago. ‘I think everyone needs to stop trying to set me up.’

  ‘Yeah,’ agreed Lexie, ‘tell that to Emma.’

  Emma and Molly worked together. Emma enjoyed matchmaking and would frequently point out men she thought would be suitable for Molly as they strolled through the door of the bookshop, seeking something to read but not necessarily a date.

  ‘I’ve got the perfect man for you,’ Emma told her one night near closing time, smiling widely at Molly and pushing her glasses back up her nose.

  ‘There’s no one in here, Emma,’ said Molly. ‘You need to finish cleaning the counter so we can go home and stop worrying about who I’m dating.’

  Emma shook her head, making her quirky pineapple earrings dance and Molly smile. Emma was so sure of herself, despite her young age, so certain of her place in the world. She dressed in wildly clashing prints and colours, not caring what the latest fashion magazine had to say. Customers had been known to come into the shop and ask for ‘the colourful girl’ because she always had such good book recommendations, matching stories to customers with an innate ability that had taken Molly years to acquire. Emma was chatty and loud, asking personal questions without a second thought, but Molly was always hyper-aware of saying the wrong thing or asking an insensitive question.

  ‘The last guy was just…’ Emma said.

  ‘I know,’ replied Molly, ‘you don’t have to say it.’

  Jaxon with an X was a personal trainer. Jaxon had curly blond hair, a very square jaw and a perfect six-pack. Jaxon had told Molly she was ‘sexy as hell’ and ‘a really beautiful spirit’, and he had been certain that if Molly just cut wine and bread and sugar and grains out of her diet, she would be much happier, look much better and certainly get her short stories rejected less by publishers. The relationship had lasted about a month before Molly had defiantly ordered a bottle of wine and a plate of creamy pasta for dinner as Jaxon looked on in horror.

  ‘The man I think would be perfect for you is not in here, Molly, not right now, but I can get him over here whenever you want,’ Emma said.

  Molly laughed at Emma’s secretive smile and shining eyes. ‘Em, I’m twenty-eight and you’re twenty. Who would you know that I can date?’

  ‘My cousin, Peter,’ said Emma triumphantly. ‘Last year he broke up with an insufferable woman who my Aunt Jenny and Uncle Simon hated, even though they were too polite to say it. Peter’s been single for six months now. I’ve decided he’s ready to date and I’ve also decided that you two would make the perfect couple.’

  ‘You have, have you?’ asked Molly, amused by Emma’s almost childish enthusiasm. ‘And what does your cousin think about that?’

  ‘I told him you were a gorgeous woman with a beautiful smile and the most glorious brown eyes.’

  ‘Thanks, Em, but I don’t feel ready for another man right now. Anyway, imagine if we did date and then broke up. You and I couldn’t be friends anymore.’

  ‘Oh, please, we’ll always be friends. Anyway, you won’t break up,’ said Emma knowingly.

  A week later Molly was unpacking a box of books when Emma came to find her in the storeroom. ‘Molly, there’s a man here who wants the latest detective novel by that famous writer… What’s her name? I’ve forgotten it.’

  ‘Oh… let me think.’

  ‘Actually, could you just serve him? I’ll finish doing this.’

  ‘Sure,’ agreed Molly.

  Molly found the customer standing in the crime fiction section staring up at the books as though he was overwhelmed by the selection. ‘Hello,’ she said, ‘I believe you’re after a certain novel by a woman writer. There was a lot published this year so it’s a bit difficult to work out who you might mean. Do you know what it’s about?’

  ‘I think,’ said the man, ‘that it’s about a missing child.’

  ‘That’s not really…’ Molly bit down on her lip to suppress a laugh. ‘That’s a common theme.’

  ‘I have faith that you can figure it out,’ he said and she could hear the smile in his voice.

  She looked up, directly at him.

  She felt her pulse speed up. He was tall with broad shoulders and vivid green eyes, magnified a little by the rimless glasses he was wearing. An errant curl stood up from his head of thick mahogany hair, and Molly wanted to pat it back into place. When he smiled, lines furrowed his forehead and his eyes lit up.

  She lifted her hand, nearly giving in to the desire to touch his face but managing to grab a novel right in front of her instead. ‘This is very good,’ she said, handing it to him. ‘Really well written and…’ She was embarrassed to hear her voice tremble and she hoped he hadn’t noticed the effect he was having on her.

  ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, Peter, just ask her out,’ Emma snapped, making both Molly and Peter jump. Neither had realised she was standing right next to them.

  ‘You’re Peter…’ said Molly.
>
  ‘I am, but please don’t be angry at us. Emma’s a pushy little cousin but she means well and I would like… I would like to take you for dinner or a drink or coffee or whatever you want really.’

  Molly wanted to say no. But ‘I would like that’ flew out of her lips instead.

  ‘Dinner turned into breakfast,’ she said, scandalising Lexie the next day.

  ‘I can’t believe you slept with him on the first night,’ her sister gasped.

  ‘I can’t believe we made it out of the restaurant before we did,’ Molly said, laughing.

  Even though she was intensely attracted to Peter and she’d never experienced a chemistry like it, she kept waiting for him to turn into the kind of pushy, overbearing man she was used to dating.

  One night they were discussing her writing career, or lack thereof. ‘Every time I think about giving up on it, I’ll get a positive reply from an agent or I’ll be shortlisted in a competition and I’ll think, well, I do have some talent and so maybe I should keep trying. But it’s been nearly a decade of really working at it now, and so far, I haven’t managed to find myself a publisher. My last agent was lovely but even she wasn’t able to get my collection published.’

  ‘Well, you know what I think?’ asked Peter.

  Here we go… thought Molly. ‘What do you think?’ she asked.

  ‘I think that you must know what you’re doing, and if this is your passion, you should keep at it until it’s no longer your passion. You only get one life, after all.’

  Molly didn’t know what to say to that.

  ‘But you’re an accountant – surely that’s not your passion?’

  ‘Actually, numbers kind of are. I’ve always liked the logic of maths. I think there’s beauty in the way it all works, but my real passion… my real passion is you.’

  ‘Me?’ Molly almost shouted. ‘But don’t you think I’m wasting my life? Don’t you want to ask me how I plan to make money in the future?’

  ‘Do you need my questions, Molly? Aren’t you already asking them of yourself?’

  ‘I am,’ she agreed, and that was the night she knew she would marry him.

  Molly smiles at the memory of that night. She picks up her phone and texts Emma, who is now a qualified physiotherapist.

  Want to do coffee on Saturday?

  The reply comes instantly:

  Would love that but fully booked with sports injuries.

  Molly sends back a sad emoji. Emma works with a lot of schoolkids and Saturday is often a very busy day. She sends another text with three different dates, knowing that Emma is never really sure of her schedule until the day before.

  Once she has cleared the breakfast things, she sits down at her computer and finds herself drawn back to the My Secret blog. She reads through the woman’s story while she holds Foggy on her lap. She shudders as she thinks about little Meredith with a man on top of her. ‘The big man,’ she says. Where have I heard that? she thinks, frustrated that the phrase keeps popping into her head.

  On impulse she calls her mother.

  ‘Hello, darling,’ she answers.

  ‘Hey, Mum, what are you doing?’

  ‘I’m baking a cake – well, the oven is baking the cake. I’ve finished the hard part.’

  Molly smiles. Her mother is always baking something. Molly and Lexie are fair cooks but terrible bakers, much to their mother’s disappointment. ‘I suppose you girls have careers,’ her mother always says. ‘I guess it’s one or the other but I was never raised to be anything but a mother and a wife and this is my—’

  ‘This is your art,’ Molly always finishes for her.

  ‘Why yes, darling, I suppose it is. Thank you for saying that.’

  Her mother now supplies the local nursing home and preschool with baked goods after a thorough inspection by the health inspector, who determined that Anne Sneddon’s kitchen was ‘sparkling clean’.

  ‘Who’s the cake for?’ asks Molly.

  ‘It’s just for us. Lexie is dropping Sophie over later when she goes to the gym and I do like to give my granddaughter a little something sweet.’

  ‘And what does Lexie think of that?’

  ‘Lexie doesn’t mind as long as it’s low sugar, which it is. I’m a good grandmother, you know.’

  ‘I know,’ says Molly and her voice catches a little as though she has been chastised for not giving her a grandchild, but she knows it’s not the case. She can see her mother standing in her kitchen in a dusty apron, the phone tucked into her shoulder so her hands can stay busy, her ash-blond hair tied back into a neat bun.

  ‘What are you doing, love? Have you finished the last story?’

  ‘Not yet,’ sighs Molly.

  ‘Your dad and I are so incredibly proud of you, you know that, don’t you? All those rejections and you never gave up.’

  ‘I know, Mum, but it’s a very small publisher and I’m unlikely to end up in millionaire author territory.’

  ‘Who cares about that? The work is the thing. I’ve told everyone I know, and the book club is buying copies as soon as it comes out.’

  ‘Thanks, Mum.’

  ‘I’ve got about ten minutes until the cake comes out – forgive me if I put on a load of washing.’

  ‘That’s okay.’ Molly laughs. Her mother is never one to sit still. ‘So, I have a strange question for you,’ she says.

  ‘Sounds intriguing…’

  Molly hears the bang of the lid on the washing machine.

  ‘Do you remember when I got Foggy?’

  ‘Foggy? You still have that? Goodness.’

  ‘Yep, still have it. Do you remember when I got it or where you got it from?’

  ‘Ooh, that’s a tough one, it was so long ago.’

  Molly hears the rushing water of the washing machine filling and she doesn’t say anything, giving her mother time to think.

  ‘I think…’ says Anne slowly. ‘Yes… yes, now I remember. It was in a shop we went into one afternoon in a shopping centre. I remember because it was just before Lexie was born and I was huge and felt like I was ready to pop but I still needed a few things for her, like dummies and some extra nappies. It was just a cheap shop, really, mostly filled with rubbish, but it was close to Easter and the whole store window was filled with fluffy chickens and coloured eggs. You tugged me to go in and I was going to buy you a chicken but you chose the frog. You went straight for it, almost as though you were looking for it.’

  ‘Oh…’ Molly replies. ‘I thought I’d had it since I was a baby.’

  ‘No, since you were around three, actually. I wanted to get you a chicken but you wouldn’t let it go.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘What’s wrong, sweetheart? You sound upset. Is the work getting to you?’

  ‘I was reading this blog yesterday and it was so sad,’ she says, the words tumbling out without her thinking about them.

  ‘I don’t know how you do it, love. I would just sit and cry.’

  ‘I do sometimes,’ admits Molly.

  ‘Maybe the next book can be a romance or something like that,’ suggests her mother.

  ‘Maybe,’ Molly agrees. ‘I do think it’s getting to me. Yesterday I read a story about a girl being abused by her mother’s partner and having to hide her little sister in a cupboard when he came into her room.’

  ‘How absolutely hideous. Some people really don’t deserve to have children.’

  ‘But the funny thing is… the funny thing is…’

  ‘Is what, darling?’

  ‘She… um… she talked about a green stuffed frog that belonged to the little sister, and when I read the words I could… I felt like I could remember the cupboard and the pink blanket. Everything. I felt like I remembered being the little sister. And I’ve had Foggy ever since I could remember… so it was really… I don’t know, it made me feel really strange. Almost like I was having an out-of-body experience. Do you know what I mean?’

  ‘Oh… oh,’ says her mother, sounding unusually flustere
d. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever… I’m sure you’re just reading too much of this stuff. Maybe you need to take a break for a day or two, but look, darling, I really have to go now. The cake is ready to come out.’

  ‘I didn’t hear the timer go off.’

  ‘I really have to go now. I love you. We’ll speak tomorrow, darling. Goodbye.’ She ends the call abruptly, leaving Molly staring at her screen in confusion.

  Her mother has never hung up on her in her life. ‘What was that about?’ she says. She calls her again, but all she gets is her voicemail.

  Molly wonders for a moment what she could have said to upset her mother but her work pulls her back to her computer. Suddenly she is writing something entirely different. It’s a story about a little boy watching his father abuse his sister through a crack in a cupboard door. The story comes effortlessly, as though it has already been written. It ends as happily as possible for a tragic story like this, with the little boy finding the courage to tell a teacher the truth and both children being rescued.

  Molly knows the character is a boy, but in her head, she sees a girl, a very small girl with light blond hair and dark brown eyes. She is watching through a crack in the cupboard door, watching the ‘big man’ peel off his filthy shirt, seeing the little girl’s glassy eyes stare at nothing, seeing her clenched fists, knuckles white.

  She knows she wants to cry out because it’s dark and scary and lonely in the cupboard, but if she cries, he comes and hurts her. She holds her stuffed frog tight to her chest and sucks her thumb, waiting for it to be over, knowing that her sister will come and get her when it is.

  Molly writes as she sees the sister focus on the cupboard. Molly sees the sister’s mouth move, even though no sound comes out. She doesn’t need to think too hard to know what she is saying to the little boy in the cupboard. ‘Go to sleep, little one,’ the sister mouths. But the words don’t fit with the story because it’s not her in the cupboard, and in the story she is writing, the girl being abused doesn’t know her brother is in the cupboard. Yet she cannot help hearing the phrase.