Free Try Not to Breathe by Holly Seddon

nappy-filled toilet. She’d stopped scowling long enough to remember how she’d loved stopping at Little Chefs on childhood journeys to stay with her mother’s various boyfriends and, rarely, to visit her father while his wife was away.
    She’d adored the Jubilee Pancakes, and the orange lollies by the till. As a seven-year-old she hadn’t even known what a calorie was.
    Valerie left them to it, they both sighed a little, at nothing, as if perhaps they could make this meeting about pancakes and gray tea. A nice little rest stop.
    “I’m really pleased you agreed to meet with me, Bob,” Alex started. “I really do want you to know that I’m not out to do a hatchet job. I’ve never written about crime or anything like it before. I mainly write about health, and that’s how I came to see Amy.”
    In her hopeful letter to Bob she had explained her chance encounter with Amy, but she wasn’t sure if he had believed her. She wondered how many offers to “tell his side” to the tabloids he’d received in the immediate aftermath.
    Bob cleared his throat. “Do I have your word that you’re not going to stitch me up or tell everyone where I am?” he asked. His voice still had its gruff edge but he had shrunk a little smaller in his chair.
    “You have my word.”
    She tried to imagine how Bob would have fared in a police interview. Snarled up with grief over his stepdaughter, probably terrified about his wife’s ability to cope, being accused of crimes he couldn’t comprehend.
    Alex and Matt had never seen eye to eye on police matters. Fairly early on in his career he’d stopped talking to her about his shifts, about the terror on interviewees’ faces, about the casual decisions he made or the acts he witnessed.
    “Bob, I have a recorder on my phone and I’d like to use that because I’m not very fast at shorthand, would you mind if I did?” Alex asked.
    “I s’pose not, I’d rather you recorded it than wrote it down wrong. That’s what’s done for me in the past.”
    Drawing a deep breath, Alex pressed record.

J acob frequently drove past the shop where he’d first met Fiona. It had changed from a printers into a pet shop but it still made him smile. Sometimes.
    As he drove past today he tried to shake the memory of this morning, tried to think of the Fiona he’d first met and not the Fiona who demanded to know why he’d deleted the Internet history on the computer in the home office. Jacob had just stood there, dumbfounded. He had thought he was being paranoid deleting his Google Map searches, and everything else.
    “It’s a surprise,” he said.
    “What surprise?”
    “Well, I didn’t want you to see what I’d looked at because I was ordering a present for you,” he said.
    She’d rolled her eyes and turned away quickly. “You should have said you were looking at porn, I’d have believed you then.”
    Six years ago, he’d been rushing in to collect some business cards for his boss. Fiona had been manning the till in the print shop; although, as she told him several times within that first conversation, she was just covering—she was actually a designer and she even had a desk. She designed the business cards and leaflets for local hairdressers and plumbers.
    Fiona had astonishing flame-red hair back then. That first day she was wearing a kind of floral-patterned dress, a half cardigan he didn’t understand and Converse trainers. He’d have guessed she was eighteen but found out later she was twenty-two. She’d passed him the business cards in a box with a flourish and before he could stop himself he said, “You remind me of someone.”
    “Someone awesome and hot?” She’d deadpanned, without cracking a smile.
    “Yes, that’s the one.” He’d smiled and she’d laughed.
    “Want to take me to lunch?” she’d asked, without showing a shred of the anxiety she later admitted to hiding really well.
    “Um, right now?” he’d asked.
    “Yeah, why not, I’m owed a