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‘What do you mean?’
‘What’re you going to do? Now you know about Drew. About all this.’
‘Max, I just can’t believe what you’ve done to her.’
‘Dad, I don’t know how to … From the start, I just wanted to protect you. I never—’
‘By taking herlife?’ he asked, dumbfounded. ‘Have you any idea how batshit crazy that sounds?’
‘That’s not what I meant. I meant I was going to deal with this myself, so you wouldn’t have to be involved.’
‘Of course I’m involved!’ Joseph shouts. ‘You thought you’d keep this one secret, is that what you’re saying? Because when Drew was reported missing, there was no danger that I’d put two and two together? I’d just think it was a fucking coincidence?’
Abruptly, as if he’s a marionette whose strings have been severed, Max sags against the doorframe, all the strength going out of him.
Joseph stares at his son. At the wreckage Max has become. And then, because he’s a father, and because he’ll never stop loving his boy, no matter what Max does, no matter how much devastation he wreaks, he limps across the bathroom and gathers him in an embrace.
He thinks of Drew’s parents, Enoch and Paula. Drew’s wider family. He thinks of Tilly, his stepdaughter. All those lives about to be changed. He thinks of the poor dead girl lying in the living room – of all the joys and losses and fierce and furious moments of life that were rightfully hers and are now for ever lost. He thinks of how different the world will be because of this. How the ripples of what happened here will spread. How they’ll echo in the smallest of ways and the largest. How he’ll only ever grasp a tiny fraction of the impact. And how Max might not even grasp that.
Except … except his boy isn’t a monster; he’s not.
He’s just lost.
‘Dad? What are we going to do?’
‘Nothing,’ Joseph says finally. ‘Not tonight. This is just … it’s too big, Max.’
‘I know.’
‘So – we’re going to go home, sleep. Or at least we’re going to lie down and get some rest. But before that, I need you to think for me. Because the veryworstoutcome would be for someone else to discover what’s happened here before we figure out what comes next. Did Drew have her phone with her? Could someone track her here because of it?’
Max shakes his head. ‘She promised to leave it at home.’
‘And you’re absolutely sure she did?’
‘She didn’t have it with her. I checked.’
‘Did anyone else know she was meeting you?’
‘No one else even knows we were seeing each other. Only me and you. And Drew, obviously.’
And Erin.
Thanks to your loose mouth.
‘Have you texted her at all since you’ve been seeing her? Contacted her on social media? Commented on her Instagrams? Any of that stuff?’
‘Not even once. Tilly would have picked up on it, which is why I never did.’
Joseph files away Max’s answers for later, when he has the headspace to think. ‘I want you to get out of here,’ he says. ‘Right now. Straight out the front door.’
‘We’re not leaving together?’
‘We’re not. And I don’t want you going home directly, either, to get tagged by Ralph Erikson’s camera. Go to the Calthorpes, sneak into their back garden and over the wall to ours. Understand?’
‘Sure.’ Max licks his lips. ‘Do we wrap her up first? Put her in the—’
‘No,’ Joseph tells him, louder than he intended. ‘We don’t touch her. Not a hair.’