Chapter 156: Lottie

Undefined Conviction

Chapter 156: Lottie

Mia watched a stranger cross a road toward Reeve and thought, very clearly: this is how it starts going wrong.

Lottie Farr did not look both ways. She came through the nursery gate and straight across two lanes with a car braking behind her, and she stopped about four feet from Reeve on the pavement with both hands pressed flat against her own stomach.

"I don't know you," she said.

"No."

"I don't know you and I know your name." Her voice was shaking. "I've never seen you in my life and I looked up and I knew your name, and I'm at work, there's a boy in there whose mum hasn't come yet, and I can't — why do I know your name?"

Reeve did not have an answer.

Mia watched him not have one. She had known Reeve Ashcombe for four years and she had watched him panic about homework and girls and a chemistry practical and once, memorably, a wasp. She had never seen him look like this — completely still, looking at a stranger the way you'd look at a photograph of yourself you didn't remember being taken.

"Finish your shift," he said eventually. "Please. We'll wait. There's a café on the corner."

"You're not going to leave."

"No."

"How do I know that?"

"You don't," Reeve said. "But you knew my name, so."

She came at half five.

She had taken off the lanyard and put a coat on and she sat down across from them in a café with a laminated menu and did not order anything, and she looked at Reeve for a long time without speaking.

Mia ordered three teas because somebody had to.

"Tell me," Lottie said.

"Tell you what?"

"Whatever it is you came here to tell me. You were standing across the road for four minutes before I saw you. You weren't picking anybody up." She had her hands round the cup the moment it arrived. "People don't stand outside nurseries for four minutes."

Reeve looked at Mia.

Mia knew that look. It was the one he gave her before exams, asking whether she thought he'd be all right, and she had always told him yes, because it was usually true.

She did not say yes this time.

"It's hers," she said. "Whatever it is, it's hers. You don't get to decide how much."

Reeve nodded slowly. He turned back.

"Do you remember being sixteen?"

Lottie remembered being sixteen.

She remembered it the way people do — school, a boyfriend called Jordan who was a disaster, her nan's house in Ashfield, learning to drive in a car park. She told them all of it, quickly, in the order it arrived.

And then she stopped.

"There's a bit missing," she said. "I've never — I've never said that out loud. There's about two months when I was sixteen where I remember everything and it's all fine and it doesn't feel like mine."

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"Like somebody else's?"

"Like a photo of a holiday you don't remember going on." She put the cup down. "You know you were there. You can see yourself in it. You just can't — get back in."

So Reeve told her.

Mia watched him do it and it was the bravest thing she had ever seen him do, including the fire extinguisher, including walking through Ivor's door. He did not soften it. He did not make it sound like a conspiracy or a film. He told a twenty-year-old woman in a café that she had been born with the rarest Conviction in the country, and that when she was sixteen somebody had sat her in a chair and carefully, painlessly, filed it down.

"And you're happy," he said. "That's what they told me. That you're happy and you've got a job you love and none of this — none of it has ever hurt you."

"It hasn't."

"I know." His voice cracked. "And I've just walked across a road and made it start, and I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I wanted to know if you were all right and you were and I should have gone home."

Lottie sat with it for a long time.

Mia watched her face and could not read any of it, which was new, because she had grown up next to somebody who read everybody and had picked up more of it than she ever admitted.

"Can you give it back?"

"I don't know."

"But you think you could."

"I don't know, Lottie. I've never — I didn't know I could do anything until about a week ago." Reeve had both hands flat on the table. "And even if I could, you'd remember everything. You'd remember them doing it. You'd have a job you love and a life that's fine, and a thing in the middle of it you'd never be able to un-know."

"Yes."

"You might not be happy anymore."

Lottie Farr looked at him.

"I've been happy for four years," she said, "and every single day of it I've known there was a room I couldn't get into. You don't get to decide that's better. Nobody gets to decide that again."

She put her hand out across the table.

Here is what Mia saw, and she would describe it to Cole that night and get it wrong, and try again, and finally say: I don't have the words. I just know it wasn't you.

Reeve took the hand.

Nothing happened for about four seconds.

Then something in the café changed — not the light, not the temperature, nothing Mia could point to. It was more like the moment a room goes quiet because somebody's stopped talking, except nobody had been talking. As if the whole café had been slightly out of focus her entire life and had just, very gently, come into it.

Reeve's eyes were shut.

He wasn't doing anything. That was the thing. There was no gold, no light, no effort in his face. He was sitting in a café holding a stranger's hand with his eyes closed, and he looked — Mia would get this bit right, eventually — he looked like somebody remembering on her behalf.

Lottie made a sound.

Not pain. The sound you make when you find something you lost years ago in a coat pocket.

It took about a minute.

The woman behind the counter had stopped wiping it.

Mia noticed her because she was the only other person in the café — sixty, apron, a cloth in one hand — and she was standing completely still with the cloth halfway through a stroke, looking at their table.

Not frightened. Not staring. Looking at it the way you'd look at a window when you suddenly realise how long it's been since you cleaned it.

A man at the next table had put his phone down. He hadn't been watching them. He'd been scrolling. And at some point in the last minute he had set the phone face-down on the table and was sitting there, doing nothing, with an expression Mia recognised because she had seen it on her own face in a mirror the night Aldric died.

He was remembering somebody.

She did not know how she knew. She knew.

When Reeve opened his eyes he was grey and sweating and he let go of her hand and put both of his flat on the table and said, "Oh. Okay. Ow," and Mia moved round and put a hand on his back without either of them saying anything about it.

Lottie was crying.

Not the way people cry when something's been taken. The way they cry at airports.

The man at the next table got up, left a five-pound note on his saucer for a two-pound coffee, and walked out without his umbrella. Through the window Mia watched him stop on the pavement, take out his phone, and dial a number, and stand very straight while it rang.

"I remember," she said. "I remember all of it. I remember the room—"

"Lottie—"

"No, listen. Listen to me. You need to hear this." She grabbed Reeve's wrist, hard. "When they did it. When I was in the chair. They didn't just file it down."

"What did they do?"

"They asked me things." Her face had gone completely white. "Over and over. Before they started. For two days. The woman with the lanyard and a man in a very good coat I couldn't look at properly."

Mia's stomach dropped.

"What did they ask?"

"Whether I knew a boy," Lottie said. "A boy with the same Conviction as me. Whether I'd ever met him, whether I'd heard his name, whether I could feel him anywhere. They asked me again and again for two days and I didn't know what they were talking about."

She was still holding his wrist.

"They were looking for you, Reeve," she said. "I was sixteen and I'd never met you. They filed down ten people to find you."

[End of Chapter 156]