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And something else came to me too—something that made me go first hot and then cold with realization, and then grope my way to the closed toilet lid to sit down before my jelly legs gave way to the rocking motion of the train.
Cole had been the one to tell Hel about Signal.
Cole had given Hel my throwaway number, had told her to message me on a burner phone. Except… what if he hadn’t? What if this whole thing was a setup? What if the person I had been texting the whole time was… Cole?
The thought made me feel almost violated. And yet… it explained something that had been preying on me ever since I saw the police at Sunsmile, and which I had not been able to figure out since: how they had known I was there at that very moment. That was information I had only given to Hel.
Someone had betrayed me. And I was as certain as I could be that it wasn’t Hel.
A nauseous wave of cold dread threatened to swamp me. But I had to be sure.
“Hel,” I typed back, “this is going to sound really stupid, but I need to ask you something. What was the name of your childhood teddy? The big blue one?”
There was a long, long pause.
Then, “Jack, is everything okay?”
“It’s fine, but I need you to tell me this, Hel. What was his name?”
Another pause.
“Fuck,” the reply came back, swiftly this time. “It’s bloody years ago. I can’t remember. Bluey?”
I felt like I had just touched an electric fence—a jolt of panic so strong I bit the inside of my cheek. If I could have, I would have thrown the phone out of the train window. But it didn’t open, and anyway, I couldn’t afford to lose it.
There was a knock at the door, but I ignored it. Instead, I stared down at the phone screen in front of me, a mixture of disgust and fear coiling inside me.
“Why?” the message came back. But it was too late. I knew.
That teddy bear had been Hel’s pride and joy. She had taken him to bed every night for sixteen years—and even then, he wasn’t thrown away, just retired, with honors, to a shelf above the wardrobe. He was one of the few things she had taken with her when we cleared our parents’ house, and now he sat on top of Kitty and Millie’s wardrobe in their room. There was no way, absolutely no way short of a coma, that Hel could have forgotten Bluebell’s name. It was engraved in my memory, let alone hers—the endless wails of “I’ve dropped Bluebell!” every night as he fell from the top bunk to the floor; the arguments every holiday over whether she could take him, and if so, whether he had to travel in the suitcase or could be carried in her arms; the terrifying twenty-four-hour scare when he got lost on the underground. The idea that Hel could have forgotten what he was called—well, it was laughable. She would as soon have forgotten Roland’s name.
I wanted to cry. But I couldn’t.
“I know,” I typed back instead. “You can stop pretending.”
Another pause.
“I’m sorry?”
“I know,” I typed again, and pressed send. Then, “I know, Cole. I know everything.”
There was another long, long pause, and then my phone began to ring.
As it did, there came another knock at the door, this one more urgent.
“I’ve got a desperate toddler out here!” I heard from the other side.
I stood, unhooked the rucksack from the back of the toilet door, and then opened it with an apologetic smile at the scowling woman standing with her little boy in the corridor.
The phone was still ringing as I moved to the far side of the little vestibule. The train lobby was the old-fashioned kind with a window that opened, and in spite of the cold wind blasting through I made no move to shut it. Hopefully the sound would cover our conversation.
I waited until I heard the lock of the toilet door slide shut, and as it clicked, the phone in my hand stopped ringing.
I was about to call back when something occurred to me, and I stopped and dug in my pocket. The Post-it with the number I had taken off the Sunsmile database was still there.
I took a deep breath—and typed it into Signal. Then I pressed call.
“You don’t understand.” It was Cole’s voice, shaking, and for the first time since Gabe’s death I didn’t feel a rush of pain at how similar they sounded—just disgust, and disbelief at my own stupidity. How could I have thought Cole sounded like Gabe? They were nothing alike. Nothing.
