Free Losing You by Nicci French Page A

parent than Nina Landry. Relations with my children may be bad, but they haven’t run away, not like that daughter of Nina Landry’s.’ I imagined the next few days, bumping into people in the street. A look of surprise. ‘I thought you were on holiday.’‘We had to cancel – unfortunately my daughter…’
    Gradually, as word spread, I would be met not by a look of surprise but of awkwardness, followed by a murmured word of sympathy delivered with the glint of excitement we feel about the disasters of other people.
    It was awful and contemptible, but it was what went through my mind and I made myself think about it as if I were plunging my hand into boiling water and holding it there.
    I poured myself another cup of coffee and sipped it. If I included the nine months of pregnancy, with its nausea, apprehension and lurching anticipation, this was the first moment for about sixteen and a half years that I hadn’t known where my daughter was. I had to decide what to do. I picked up the phone and called Renata’s mobile.
    ‘Nobody’s seen anything of her,’ she said, ‘but – ’
    ‘I know,’ I said, interrupting her. ‘You can come back now. I’ll tell you about it.’
    ‘Don’t you want us to – ’
    ‘No,’ I said, and hung up.
    What were my possibilities? The policeman had made Charlie’s departure seem like just another of those things that happen as children grow up, like birthday parties and Brownies. According to that view, I could get on with my life, with a few regrets and sniffles, and wait for my daughter to be in touch. I only had to articulate that to myself to realize how impossible it was. I had to find Charlie and talk to her, even if the only result of it was that she told me things I didn’t want to know. I tried to think what other mothers would do and it just wouldn’t compute. I was stuck with myself and there was nothing I could do about it. Charlie was fifteen years old, she was my child and I had to find her. Everything else could wait. So, where did I start?
    My first impulse was to jump into the car, drive, stop strangers in the street and just do anything and everything until she was found. Hysteria and instant action might have made me feel better, or stopped me dwelling on things that were painful, but I needed to be effective. I reached for the pad that I kept on the kitchen table for shopping lists. It had a pen attached to it by a Velcro strip. I ripped it off and doodled as I tried to order my thoughts.
    Charlie had taken a few possessions with her so she must have run away from someone or with someone or to someone. She could have gone to stay at a friend’s. The worst possibility was that, whatever Rick had said, she had up and gone alone, hitched a lift, left with no plans and no destination, just heading away. I thought of Charlie standing by a road, thumbing a lift, getting into a stranger’s car, leaving us all behind, and felt a stinging in my eyes. For the first time in my life I thought of killing myself and then I thought of Jackson and Charlie and put that idea away for ever.
    What was most likely was that she would be with a friend, or that a friend would know of her plans. If I could find someone to put me in touch with Charlie, I could talk to her and she could tell me what had gone wrong between us. Where to start? At some point before the party had begun, while I was out having my car fixed, Charlie had returned to the house, retrieved what she needed and gone. Her decision to leave, or at least her decision to leave today, before going on holiday, must have been sudden or she would have taken her purse and washbag to Ashleigh’s. One guest after another at the party had told me how Charlie had organized it. I knew my daughter was a wonderfully strange and chaotic girl, but would even she organize a surprise party for her mother on the day she was going to run away from home?
    Now a thought occurred to me. Could it have been that something had happened