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Jessica hears the skitter of dogs’ claws across the graveled parking area, the clamor of barking nearby. They can smell her. They know she’s here.
“What?” she hears Debra say to the dogs. “Is there someone up there? What is it?”
Jessica sees the beam from the flashlight arc across the top of the house and she tucks herself tight in away from it. The dogs are coming for her, and she knows that she needs to either get out of here, or get into the house, so she breathes in hard and pulls herself up the drainpipe to the second floor, where she pushes open an unlocked window and climbs onto the landing. She opens and closes three doors before she finds Belle’s bedroom. And there is Belle, asleep, curled into herself on a narrow single bed under a thin quilt. Her room is cold and damp.
“Belle!”
The girl stirs.
“Belle! Wake up!” She touches Belle’s shoulder gently, and the small figure wakes slowly from a very deep sleep.
“Oh,” she says. “What’s happening?”
“I don’t have time to explain. I just need you to come with me, right now.”
“What?”
“Listen to me. This is not really your house. You were kidnapped and are being held here against your will. You’re not really Belle. Your real name is Grace.”
“Grace?”
“Yes. Grace Partridge. That’s your real name. Look.” Jessica switches on her phone, which she’s already preloaded with the photo from the news article.
Belle looks at the photo and then looks up at Jessica with wide eyes. “I don’t understand….”
But there’s no time for her to understand. Jessica can hear Debra moving through the house, the urgent creaks of footsteps on the stairs. She regards the window over the small bed. It’s small too, with a metal frame, but it looks big enough for them both to get through. She looks at Belle, in her tiny floral-print pajama set, then hurls open her closet doors and pulls out a hoodie and a pair of track pants.
“Put these on,” she says. “Quickly.”
Belle stares at her with blank eyes.
Jessica growls and wraps the clothes around the girl roughly, picks Belle up in a bear hug, climbs onto the bed, blasts the window out with one hard kick that snaps the metal frames and splinters the glass into a thousand shards, and then, with a slick of bitter bile hitting the back of her throat, grips the girl’s body hard and jumps.
Nine years ago
Farnham, Surrey, UK
Polly poses, her phone on a stand on the kitchen counter in front of her. She looks at her face on the screen of her phone and sees shadows cast from her brow bone that darken her eyes, so she strides across the room and turns off the halogens, redirects the table lamps so they shine more directly upon her, and returns to her spot.
But now there’s something not right about the corners of her mouth.
They look slightly mean, slightly downcast. And her eyebrows are wrong. She goes back to her mirror, digs into her makeup bag, smudges off her lip liner and reapplies it. Then she combs through her eyebrows, making sure each hair is exactly in place. She throws a tea towel over one of the lamps and takes her spot again. Still not quite right, but at this time of year with no decent light to work with, it’s the best she can do. She leans forwards and presses record.
“Hi, guys,” she begins, holding aloft a tube of her latest product, Beauty X Pore Magic. “Look at this! I have just this minute got it back from the lab, and I am too excited to show you how this works.”
She holds the packaging up to the camera, the distinctive mint-green box with the hot-pink lettering. She opens it and pulls out the golden tube.
“Look,” she says, showing it to the camera. “Isn’t it beautiful? But just you wait until you see what this stuff can do. Remember how much you all loved the Visage Magic Serum, well, this goes one step further. One application, over your serum, leave it for just a minute or two, and I swear you will see your pores simply disappear. Let me show you.”
She brings her face closer to the screen and spreads the serum over the right side of her face.
“So, all I’ve got on this side of my face is the serum, nothing else, and look, you can see how patchy my skin still is in places—even the Visage Magic couldn’t completely smooth over those areas. But watch this.”
She adds the serum to the left side of her face, layers the Beauty X Pore Magic on top of it, and then steps back again. “Right, I’m seeing a difference already. Look at that…can you see?”
Polly always feels a little silly talking to the camera like it’s going to answer. But in the end, that’s a small price to pay for her goals. She knows these products are incredible. And so they should be. They come at quite a price. But all the effort is worth it when she gets the comments under her posts from the women who’ve been empowered by her products, by her words, by her.
She has nearly two and a half thousand followers now. She’d have more, but she has to set her page to private, so it’s more like a members’ club than an Instagram account. She markets it that way, uses the exclusivity factor to ramp up the value of her brand and to allow her to charge one hundred pounds for a tube of cream. But the truth, of course, is that she needs to vet her followers the same way she needs to vet everyone who buys her products, because of the very particular nature of those products. Because they are untested and unlicensed. Because the smart mint-green-and-hot-pink packaging is printed with nonsense ingredients and nonsense declarations of authenticity and nonsense assurance of adherence to organic standards. She can’t exactly market the truth about her products, that they are unethical to the nth degree. What her customers need to know is that these products work.
