Page 75 of You've Got The Love
I don’t text back:How exactly do I not engage when they have your daughter? When they have my…?
The thought won’t complete itself. I shut my eyes for a second and open them again before pictures start making themselves without my permission.
Another car. This one faster. It swings in too close to the edge and corrects in a little scream of tyre on grit. The driver’s door opens. A man gets out and waves an arm at the sedan like he’s late to his own idea. He’s on the phone and he’s angry into it. He paces a line shaped like a mistake.
No Amber.
Time slows down and doubles. I look at my watch and it’s ten to midnight. I look again and it’s five to. The men keep smoking, keep pacing, keep looking like this is an irritation, not an escalation. I want to scream at them from across the concrete to act like they’re holding a human life in their hands, but I don’t, because I want to see her first. I need to see her before I do anything that can’t be undone.
A van turns onto the lane—boxy, anonymous, the kind used for deliveries and other things that don’t want to be labelled. It trundles to the light and stops crooked. The back doors open from the inside.
My body moves before my brain does, a step forward out of the shadow, and I have to drag myself back, because if I run now to any van that opens, I’m done before I start. I force my hands flat against the cold side panel of my own van and push until my palms hurt.
A figure climbs down. Small. Hood up. Elbows pinched in tight like someone trying to keep heat in—or keep from taking up space. A hand grips her arm and guides—no, drags—her closer to the light.
My heart stops and starts again with a brutal kick.
Amber.
She’s upright. She’s walking. That’s the first fact I grab. Her face is pale under the shadow of the hood; her mouth is a hard line I recognise from the cabin—the one she gets when she’s scared and doesn’t want the fear to be the only thing in the room. Her hands are in front of her, together; for a terrible second, I think they’ve tied her wrists, but when she moves, I see a flash of skin—no rope. Just the way she’s holding herself.
The man holding her arm says something to the cigarette man, and he nods once, stubs the cigarette under his boot, then checks his phone. I can’t hear them. The wind carries words away and brings back only shapes.
My own phone buzzes again. I ignore it. The world has narrowed to the four people under the light and the fact that my person is among them.
“Okay,” I whisper, though I don’t know who I’m talking to. “Okay.”
I slide my fingers into my inner pocket and press the screen to take the call off mute. “I see her,” I say, voice a ghost. “Jack. I see her.”
“Keep me on,” he says. The sound of bikes—distant, angry—threads through his end of the line. “Tell me everythin’.”
“They’ve got her under the light,” I say. “She’s standing. She looks—she looks okay. No blood.” The word tastes like metal.
“What do they want?” he asks.
“I don’t know yet.” My mouth is dry. “They haven’t looked this way.”
“Don’t go to them,” he says. “Make ‘em come to you. If you walk into their circle, they control the ground.”
“I’m not walking anywhere yet,” I say, and it’s the most honest sentence I’ve said tonight.
The man with the phone pockets it and cups his hands around his mouth to shout. The words rip across the space and break against the water.“Van der Meer!”
My name hits me like a thrown stone.
He can’t see me. Not yet. But he knows I’m here. Of course he does. There’s nowhere else to go.
I step out from the shadow of my van because if I don’t, they’ll come and haul me out like trash. The light carves a line across the concrete, and I stop just at the edge of it, like I’m standing on a border I didn’t know existed until now.
“Right here,” I call back. My voice tries to shake, and I make it stop. “I’m here.”
Amber’s head jerks, her eyes finding me, and the look that crosses her face nearly takes me to my knees. Relief. Fear. A thousand unsaid things. I can’t say any of them back, so I lift a hand—the smallest, stupidest wave—and she flinches like she can feel it against her cheek.
“Good,” the man says, and it’s such a normal word it makes me want to hit him. “Let’s make this simple.”
There’s nothing simple about any of this.
I take a breath so deep it hurts, and for one beat in the middle of all this noise there’s a clear line in my head: the first time I saw Amber in her shop, hands in soil, brow furrowed, hair in her signature messy bun with ringlets around her face and nape, and the way she looked up at me like she was choosing whether to let me in. Then Abel, small and fierce, the way he climbs into my lap and settles like he always belonged there. Then Marieke, smiling as they wheeled her away, telling me to be ready—three points on a map that have led me here.
