Free Losing You by Nicci French

rid it of the last of the coffee grounds, cleaning them away with my fingers in the fiercely cold water. I took a pack of coffee beans from the fridge, ground them and tippedsome into the cafetière. The water boiled and I poured it on to the coffee. I also made a piece of toast and marmalade. I sat at the kitchen table and gulped the hot, black, strong coffee and ate the toast in slow, deliberate bites. After all, what did it matter now? I had lots and lots of time.
    I had woken into a new world, a world that was cold and harsh and entirely different from anything I had ever imagined for myself, and I had to think about it carefully and with clarity. I had got up this morning and been one person and now I was another. I was a woman whose daughter, aged fifteen, had run away from home. I had a daughter who had secretly gathered together a few pathetic possessions and some money and had gone out into a biting December day rather than be in this home with me. There was somewhere else she would rather be, perhaps someone else she would rather be with. Anywhere but here.
    There was something I found hard to confess even to myself. It was the single most shameful thing I had ever felt in my entire life. I felt embarrassed. Gradually, the people around me, family, friends, acquaintances, neighbours, would hear that Nina Landry was a mother whose daughter had run away from home. Parents having terrible rows with their children would comfort themselves by saying, ‘At least I’m a better 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 murmuredword 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, stopstrangers 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