Page 88 of The Perfect Son

Indra looks around before taking a long shuffle back and around me. I’m scaring her, I realize, straightening up and spinning around and around, my eyes scouring the shop for Jamie.

He’s nowhere.

“Is everything OK, Tess?” Mel asks, appearing beside her daughter.

“Have you seen Shelley?” I keep turning, faces and bodies blurring. None of them are Shelley or Jamie.

“Er...” Mel looks casually around the store. There’s no urgency to her glances, none of the panic I feel building inside me.

Shelley has disappeared. So has Jamie.

Stop, Tessie.

I can’t, Mark. I can’t let anything happen to Jamie.

Then it clicks—the pieces falling into place, the answer to the final cryptic clue—the thought I was trying to reach before Ian started talking to me. Shelley doesn’t want to help me, she wants a son to replace Dylan. She wants Jamie. All of a sudden my head is filled with Shelley’s voice.“I miss being a mother almost as much as I miss Dylan... I want a child so badly, Tess.”

The shop spins before my eyes, or maybe it’s me spinning. Where are you, Shelley? What have you done with Jamie?

“There she is,” Indra shouts, flinging a finger toward the bag section.

I weave and push through people to get to Shelley.

“Oh, hey,” she says. “What do you think?” She holds up a brown handbag, with a shiny gold buckle.

“Jamie.” My voice is a strangled hiss. “Where’s Jamie? You were supposed to be watching him.”

“I...” Her eyes dart around the shop floor, her expression the mirror of my own panic. She hasn’t taken Jamie, but she has lost him.

Suddenly they crowd around me—Mel, with Indra hugging her side, and Shelley and Ian. They are a wall blocking my view of the shop and the front doors.

What if Jamie is back on the street? What if someone takes him?

Stop, Tessie.

“Tess?” Ian raises his eyebrows and frowns. I can’t tell if it’s concern or irritation furrowing his brow but I don’t care. Go away, I want to scream at him. “What’s wrong?” he asks.

My legs feel suddenly weak. “I can’t find Jamie,” I whisper, staringunblinking at the faces of the shoppers who’ve stopped to stare, then looking back at Mel and Ian again. They stare back with pitiful confusion as if I’m speaking in a different language. Sweat dampens my skin beneath my clothes, and my breathing becomes short and gasping. Why is no one helping me?

“JAMIE?” I spin around. More shoppers stop and stare but I don’t care. “I’ve lost my son,” I shout out.

Shelley moves first, pushing her way to the front of the shop to check the street.

“JAMIE,” I shout again.

A woman with a tight perm places a hand on her chest and backs away as if I’ve just told her I’m wearing a bomb under my coat. What is wrong with these people? “He’s seven,” I shout. “He’s wearing a... a blue jacket and jeans and he has blond, curly hair.”

My heart is pounding so fast I can’t breathe through the force of it.

People start to move and look around the floor as if he might be sitting by their feet, as if I’ve dropped an earring.

“Tess?” Ian’s voice is low and firm and I know he’s going to tell me to calm down. How can I?

It’s an effort to speak. A lightness floats across my eyes but I push it away. “Stay here,” I shout to them as I move deeper into the shop. “I’ll go look upstairs.”

“Jamie?” I call out, running up the escalator. My foot slips and my left knee smashes into the metal grille of the step in front. Pain sears across my leg and there’s a trickle of wet seeping through my tights.

Shelley is shouting my name and I glance back, willing Jamie to be by her side, but he isn’t. She’s near the front doors talking to a security guard with a walkie-talkie.