I want your pain permanent. And you still have another family

member who won’t care what I do to her.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘You took my son,’ he says. ‘You still owe me.’

He hangs up.

I hand the phone back to the nurse, extending my arm without really seeing her. The desk, the paintings, the window into the office behind her — they all seem to lose detail and disappear.

‘Theo?’

I know Carol is speaking to me, but I don’t look at her. The

phone has gone from my hand but I’m still holding out my arm

ramrod straight.

‘Theo?’

She touches my shoulder, and the contact seems to work.

I look at her and she starts to say something, but I don’t wait to hear what it is. I cover the foyer with large strides and the heavy door weighs nothing as I pull it open.

When I reach the cemetery I have this hollow feeling in my

stomach, similar to the one that was there the day my daughter died. It’s a feeling that grows worse when I bring the car to a stop. I run towards Emily’s grave, though the pile of dirt next to it already tells me what I’m going to find. All these cops out here and nobody stopped Alderman from desecrating her grave.

But why would they? They were never there to protect her from

dying. Just as I wasn’t there. And in this case it simply would have looked from a distance as if Alderman was doing his job.

Just digging a hole. Just moving on with life after losing his son — if they even saw him at all. And looking towards the lake, I can already tell they couldn’t. There was no way.

I stand at the edge of the grave. I know now there were two

reasons Alderman threatened my wife. The first was to scare me.

The second was to send me away from the cemetery. That means

he was watching me all along. He was waiting.

My little girl’s coffin is down there. The lid is open and Emily is gone.

chapter eighteen

All the oxygen is sucked out of me. I stare down at the coffin with the silk linings and soft pillow, and the world outside of the grave fades away and goes black. There are crumbs of dirt where my

daughter should have been. The brass handles have pitted, the

glossy sheen of the wood long since gone. There are cracks and dents in the wood. My first reaction is to climb down and make sure with my hands as well as my eyes that Emily isn’t in there.

My second reaction is to scream. Instead I fall back to the third reaction, the one I had two years ago when I got the call about the accident. I drop to my knees and start to weep and try to

convince myself this isn’t really happening.

It should be simple to know which is worse — my wife

missing or my daughter — but suddenly I don’t know. Suddenly

they both seem as bad as each other. I guess the worse of the two is the one that is happening. I’ve dealt with a lot over the years, but never somebody’s dead child being stolen from a graveyard.

Kidnapped. I don’t even know if that’s the term for it.

I have no real idea what to do. No real direction to take. A

dead child is every parent’s worst nightmare. What is it when all the nightmares come true?

I have lost Emily. Again.

Two years ago it had been on a Tuesday. Tuesdays are a nothing day. People don’t make great plans for a Tuesday. They don’t get married. Don’t leave for holiday. They don’t organise house

warmings. But the fact is one in seven people dies on a Tuesday.

One in seven is born. What better day to lose your family? Is

there a worse day? That Tuesday should have been like the others.

I kissed my daughter and my wife on the way out the door, and

the next time I saw them Emily was lying on a metal slab with a sheet tucked up to her neck so I could see her face. Bridget was in a world between life and death, hooked up to machinery and

surrounded by doctors.

Hours earlier they had gone out to see a movie. It was two

o’clock in the afternoon, and Disney was entertaining my daughter on the big screen with animals that could talk and evade capture and do taxes and everything else clever animals can do. It was school holidays. My wife was a teacher, so it was holidays for her too. At quarter to four the movie ended and my wife walked my

daughter outside along with dozens of other parents and children.

They walked around the shopping complex footpath towards her

car. It was ten to four, and already Quentin James was drunk. It was ten to four in the middle of the afternoon, and Quentin James was behind the wheel of his dark blue SUV that he had paid a

four-hundred-dollar fine to get back that morning. He had no

driver’s licence but that didn’t stop him paying the fine; it didn’t stop the courts from handing over the keys. I can only imagine how it happened — bits of imagery I added together with details from eye witnesses. The SUV swerving through the car park. The SUV jumping the curb onto the footpath. My wife and daughter

hearing it, both of them turning towards the sound. Emily’s tiny hand tight inside my wife’s grip. The look on Bridget’s face as she realised there was nothing they could do, that the SUV was going to knock them around like rag dolls.

She pushed Emily out of the way. That’s what they tell me. She did what any mother would do and tried to save her daughter.

Only it wasn’t enough. The four-wheel-drive slammed into them

both; it knocked my wife onto the hood, it rolled my daughter

beneath the wheels, and it broke them. It broke my little girl up inside beyond repair. It did the same to my wife. It did the same to me. And to my parents.

And still Quentin kept driving. He would tell me two weeks

later, when I took him away to a small corner of the world, that he couldn’t even remember running into them. He told me

that it wasn’t him, not really, but the man he became when the booze took over. Therefore I had the wrong man. He was sick,

he said, and it was the sick Quentin who ran over and killed my daughter. The Quentin pleading for his life in front of me wasn’t the man who had killed my girl, at least according to the sober Quentin, but that didn’t matter to me. It was the bullshit plea of a weak and cowardly drunk during one of his few sober moments.

He said he couldn’t remember running them over but that didn’t matter either. I could. And so could witnesses. They told me the impact sounded dull, like heavy suitcases being dropped on the pavement from a second-storey window. They told me my wife

rolled across the hood of the SUV and was thrown hard into

the concrete. They told me my little girl tumbled and bounced

beneath the chassis until she was spat out the end, ejected from between the wheels all twisted and bloody. They tell me my wife and daughter ended up in the same place, side by side on the

pavement. Quentin kept on driving.

Quentin James was caught within an hour. His four-wheel

drive with the bull bars on the front that was never once used off road in the four years he owned it was impounded. It was

kept as evidence. He was charged with manslaughter and reckless driving, but he should have been charged with murder. I never

figured that one out. The guy chose to drive drunk. He chose to do it every single damn day of his life. That means it didn’t come down to fate or bad luck, but down to a conscious choice. That and statistics. It came down to mathematics. It means it had to happen. Put a drunk guy out on the roads every day and he’s

bound to kill somebody. Has to happen, the same way if you keep flipping a coin it has to come up tails.

So for me, manslaughter didn’t cut it. Didn’t come close. He