“I’m not angry with you,” she continued. “I understand why you left like that the other day. I’ve spoken to Jim. I know how much it must’ve hurt you to find out the man you caught wasn’t the one who took Ethan Reed.”
“Please go away,” Harlan murmured, barely audible.
“I’m not leaving until you speak to me.” Eve’s voice was as resolute as it was concerned. “Do you hear me, Harlan? I don’t care if I have to stand here all night.”
Harlan knew she meant it. She could be as stubborn as him when she wanted to be. That was one of the reasons they’d worked so well together. “Please go away,” he repeated louder, his tone apologetic.
He heard Eve draw a breath of relief. “If that’s what you really want, I will. But not until you tell me why.”
“You don’t need me in your life, Eve.”
“Why don’t you let me be the judge of what I need.”
“I’ll just end up hurting you again.”
“Better that than going through life feeling nothing, which is what I’ve felt this last four years.”
“You wouldn’t say that if you could feel what I feel.” Harlan’s words came in a pained, weary breath. “I’d give anything to feel nothing.”
“But then you wouldn’t be you, and I wouldn’t love you like I do.”
Harlan closed his eyes, pressing his forehead against the door. It made him want to weep with joy to hear Eve say she loved him, but it also made the guilt flare like a furnace in his heart. How could he let himself love and be loved when Susan Reed and her family were enduring such torment? Bile rose up his throat at the thought of him enjoying himself while Ethan, if he was still alive, was subjected to God knows what kind of horrors.
As if reading his thoughts, Eve said, “It seems to me that you want to punish yourself because you think you’re somehow to blame for what’s happened to Ethan. But you’re not to blame.”
“How do you know? If I hadn’t killed his father, he might not have been taken.”
“Maybe that’s true, maybe not. But either way, it doesn’t change the fact that you’ve paid for what you did.”
“I’ve paid my debt to society, but not to them, not to Susan Reed and her kids.”
“You’ve done everything you could possibly do to try and get that boy back.”
“Have I? I don’t know. Maybe there’s something else I can do.”
Eve released an exasperated sigh. “If there was, you’d be out there doing it.”
She was right, Harlan knew. He’d racked his brain for some other line of inquiry to follow, but there wasn’t one. He ground his forehead against the door in frustration.
“You have to forgive yourself for what happened, Harlan,” continued Eve, “because there’s no way of going back and changing it.”
Harlan shook his head, muttering with savage self-recrimination, “I can’t forgive myself.”
“If you don’t, you’ll throw away any chance of happiness we’ve got.”
“You don’t need me to be happy, Eve.”
“There you go again. Telling me what I need. Believe me, Harlan, I’ve tried to move on from you. I thought I had done, until I heard your voice. Christ knows why after everything you’ve put me through, but the fact is I need you. I need to be with you.”
Again, Harlan’s chest ached with a contradictory mingling of joy and guilt. “You don’t seem to understand. I can’t wipe this blood off my hands. It’ll be there forever, tainting everything I touch.”
“No, Harlan, you don’t understand. I’m not scared by that. I’m scared of being alone.”
“I don’t want to be alone either.” Harlan’s voice grew low with longing. He’d learnt all about loneliness in jail — the kind of loneliness that was so severe you felt it like a physical pain. “I want to fall asleep with you in my arms every night and wake up with you beside-” He broke off. He could feel his resolve weakening with every word. He pushed himself away from the door. “I’m sorry, Eve, I can’t talk anymore.”
“So that’s it.” Eve’s voice was on the edge of tears. It took hold of Harlan and stopped him from retreating any further. “You’re just going to hide in there and drive yourself crazy agonising over something you can’t do anything about.”
“Please go. Please!”
“Okay, but first I want you to promise me that you won’t do anything stupid like kill yourself.”
“You don’t need to worry about that.” The thought of suicide hadn’t crossed Harlan’s mind since Ethan went missing.
“Promise me.”
“I promise.”
“I’ll be back tomorrow to make sure you’ve kept your promise. I’m not going to give up on us so easily.”
As Harlan listened to Eve’s footsteps echo away, an urge came over him to tear the door open, run after her and fling his arms around her. Resisting it with a wrench of willpower, he fell back against the wall, hugging himself, sliding to the floor. “She’s coming back,” he murmured, lips twitching as if they didn’t know whether to smile or grimace.
Harlan held onto that thought, using it to get him through the long night when he was being tortured by images of what he’d done to Robert Reed and what others might be doing to Ethan. The next morning he woke up telling himself he wasn’t going to be in when Eve came knocking. But all day he sat in the living-room, listening out for her. To kill time, he turned on the television. Susan Reed appeared on the lunchtime news wearing a t-shirt with Ethan’s face on it and the words ‘Have you seen ETHAN REED?’. She spoke to the news reader from her tiny kitchen, which was crammed with people sorting through boxes of posters and leaflets. Her expression was no longer dazed. Her frowning, bloodshot eyes somehow managed to simultaneously convey a sense of fatalistic weariness and steely determination. The Baptist preacher, Lewis Gunn, stood grave-faced at her side, resting a supportive hand on her shoulder.
“The search for my son will continue as long as it takes,” Susan told the news reporter. “Whether that be days, months or years. We’ll never give up hope of finding him.”
When Susan finished speaking, the preacher, in his usual vigorous manner, informed the viewers that he was organising several events to raise money for the reward fund. He appealed to people to give generously and read out a telephone number for donations. Harlan greeted the announcement with mixed feelings. The offer of a large reward often led to an influx of new information, most of which, although of little or no use, was given in good faith. But it also brought out the chancers and scammers, passing the police weak or even knowingly false information in the hope of getting their hands on the money.
The knock eventually came late in the afternoon. Harlan sprang up and hurried to the door. “Eve?”
“Hello, Harlan. I told you I’d be back. I’ve brought you some pasta.” Eve waited a moment to see if Harlan would open the door, before adding, “I’ll leave it out here for you.”
Saliva filled Harlan’s mouth — he hadn’t eaten a decent meal since visiting Eve’s flat. He looked at the door handle, swallowing. Hating himself for it, he slowly reached for the Yale lock and opened the door. His gaze flicked from Eve’s face to the plastic carton of pasta she held, as if he couldn’t decide which he wanted more. In return, her eyes moved over him anxiously as if searching for signs of illness or self-abuse.
Wordlessly, Harlan motioned for Eve to come in. She moved past him, glancing from side to side, her gaze lingering on the sheets scrunched at the bottom of his otherwise bare mattress, the bathroom with its mound of dirty clothes and towels, and the kitchen work-surfaces cluttered with unwashed pots, half-eaten cans of baked beans and spaghetti, and mould-flecked bread. “Cosy, isn’t it?” Harlan said, with a crooked smile.
In the living-room, Eve handed him the pasta and sat on the sofa watching while he voraciously consumed it at the table. “Why are you doing this to yourself?” she asked when he’d finished.
“You know why.”
“Jim says the boy’s dead.”
Eve’s words laced Harlan’s forehead with lines like cracked clay. “He can’t know that for sure.”