Free I Found You by Lisa Jewell Page A

there last night.’
    ‘What is it with you and that beach? I thought you’d got your memory back and gone home.’
    ‘Well, that’s the thing.’ He looks over her shoulder, wistfully. ‘I remembered something. Something big.’He looks again and she relents and opens the door properly so that he can come in. She gets them both a beer and they sit side by side on the sofa, Sadie at their feet, Hero on Alice’s lap, Griff keeping a polite distance.
    ‘Kids all in bed?’ he asks.
    ‘Small one in bed, the others on their beds. Doing things with screens.’ As she says this her phone pops. She glances at it fleetingly. Jasmine has left Alice’s phone logged on to Instagram. Someone, somewhere, has liked something that Jasmine has posted on Instagram. This means that Alice’s phone will continue to pop for the next ten minutes or so as everyone Jasmine knows likes the thing she posted. Alice pictures a sea of disembodied thumbs senselessly pressing hearts. She sighs.
    ‘What’s that?’ asks Frank, looking at the iPad.
    ‘That’s my parents’ living room,’ she says. ‘In London.’
    He nods. As though that makes sense.
    ‘They’ve both got dementia,’ she explains. ‘They have visiting carers but no one to watch them 24/7. And, believe me, they need someone to watch over them. My sister’s got the same set-up. So hopefully between me and her and the carers we can keep them at home for a while longer. Because the alternative is, well . . . unthinkable.’
    She smiles tightly, hardly able to believe that less than two years ago her parents were planning a tripto the Great Wall of China and now neither of them is capable of planning even a trip to the bathroom.
    ‘My life is very strange,’ she says.
    ‘So is mine,’ he says and they both laugh.
    She can’t believe how relieved she’d felt to see him standing there in her doorway just now. She’d tried very hard to sound stern but had had to resist the urge to throw her arms around him and say, Thank God you’re back . So now she is being circumspect and cool because that is her default approach to life and throwing her arms around people is not.
    ‘So,’ she says. ‘What’ve you been up to?’
    Frank smiles and turns his beer bottle around in his hands. ‘I had this theory that I must have chosen this town for a reason. You know, I bought a ticket to come here. I found my way to the beach. It can’t be random. So I thought if I walked around for a while, something might jog my memory.’
    ‘And it did?’
    ‘Yes!’ His hazel eyes light up. ‘I remembered a girl on a carousel. One of those old-fashioned ones with horses going up and down?’ He looks at her uncertainly as though unsure that he has made any sense, so she nods encouragingly.
    ‘The steam fair,’ she says. ‘It comes every summer.’
    ‘Oh!’ He looks pleased. ‘So it might be real?’
    ‘Yes. It might be. And who was this girl?’
    ‘I don’t know. But she had brown hair and she was very young, a teenager I’d say.’
    ‘No idea at all who she might be?’
    ‘Well, no, but a weird thing happened. I went down to the beach, up by the high street, because I had a strong feeling that that was where I’d seen this girl on the carousel . . .’
    ‘That’s where they have it. Exactly.’
    He smiles. ‘The fair?’
    ‘Yes, on the beach, beneath the high street! So, what happened when you went down there?’
    ‘I threw up,’ he says.
    ‘What, literally?’
    ‘Yes. Just out of the blue. And then after that I couldn’t move. It was like Wednesday again. I sat down and looked out to sea and my mind just went kind of opaque and people came and people went but I was just zoned out. And then, just now, when it got dark, I remembered something else. I remembered . . .’ His hands were shaking. ‘I remembered a man, jumping into the sea, here. It was definitely here. And it was dark and I could see the moonlight on the water and the man kept swimming and swimming and I