She didn't tell them everything at the meeting.
She told them most of it. She told them about the drive to Renner Street, the gate, the knock, the voice. She told them about you're braver than I expected and you should go home to your son and the way MM had said her name without being given it. She watched their faces as she talked — Jessica steady and focused, Gerald with that jaw thing, Kate writing in her notebook, David Ben with his hands flat on the table.
She did not tell them about come inside and I'll tell you.
She wasn't sure why she kept it back. It wasn't a conscious decision exactly, more like the thing arrived at the edge of being said and she let it pass, the way you let a wave pass when you're not sure how big it is. She told herself she'd tell them later. She told herself it wasn't relevant yet. She told herself a lot of things sitting at Jessica's kitchen table on a Saturday morning with the others looking at her and waiting.
She believed about half of them.
The meeting lasted two hours.
Kate had done more research. Kate, it turned out, had been doing research continuously since the message had arrived, in the particular relentless way that Kate did things, and the results of that research were spread across three pages of her notebook in handwriting Grace couldn't quite read from across the table but which looked thorough and slightly alarming.
There was a town called Merritt, three hours north. Two years ago there had been a cluster of what the local GP had described in a community newsletter as unexplained fatigue cases in children between the ages of six and ten. Seven children across four families. All had recovered. None of the families still lived in Merritt. The school there had had a student named — Kate paused and looked at her notebook — Daniel Hayes, enrolled mid-year, single guardian listed, no transfer file, contact number that rang out during school hours.
Daniel Hayes had left Sunnyside Primary eighteen months ago.
Grace watched David Ben's face as Kate said this. Something moved across it that he controlled quickly but not quite quickly enough.
"You knew," Jessica said.
"I didn't know," David said carefully. "I had a suspicion. A very vague one. I requested Daniel's transfer records when he enrolled here and got almost nothing and I — it was familiar. The shape of it was familiar. But I had no evidence of anything and Daniel was only here for one term and then he was gone."
"Gone where?" Kate asked.
"The family moved. That's what the form said." He looked at his hands. "I tried to follow up. I got nowhere."
The table was quiet for a moment.
"So she's done this before," Gerald said. "With a different child. A different town."
"It looks that way," Kate said. "I don't know how many times. Merritt is as far back as I've gotten so far."
Grace thought about the voice. You're braver than I expected. Said with the patience of someone who had watched many things happen from behind a closed door and found most of them predictable.
"She knew we'd come," Grace said. "She's done this enough times to know what parents do when they get a message like that. She knows we investigate, she knows we get closer, she knows eventually someone comes to the door." She looked around the table. "She's seen it before."
"Which means the message isn't a warning," Kate said.
A beat.
"It's a lure," Jessica said.
Nobody argued with it. The word sat in the middle of the table and they all looked at it and nobody argued.
Grace thought about come inside and I'll tell you and looked at the table and said nothing.
She drove home from the meeting and sat in the car in her driveway for a few minutes before going in.
November 14th was one week away.
Seven days. She could feel the number in a physical way now, a weight she carried around that was getting incrementally heavier as the days came off it. Jessica had proposed going to the police that afternoon — properly, formally, a statement, all four of them together — and Grace had agreed and so had Gerald and David had said he would come with them and Kate had said she'd prepare a summary of everything they had. Monday, they'd agreed. Monday morning, first thing.
Six days until November 14th by then.
Grace had said yes to all of it and driven home and now she was sitting in her car in the dark driveway thinking about whether six days was enough.
She went inside.
Oliver was in the lounge with the television on, lying on the couch in the inverted way he lounged, head hanging off one end, feet up on the back, somehow completely comfortable. He looked up at her upside down.
"You were ages," he said.
"Sorry." She dropped her bag and sat in the armchair. "Good morning?"
"It was okay. Can we have pizza tonight?"
"Probably."
He flipped himself the right way up and looked at her with the direct assessing look he'd had since he was two, the look that meant he was reading something in her face and deciding whether to ask about it. He'd gotten this from her, she knew. The same impulse she had, the reading of rooms, the gathering of information before committing to a response.
"Mum," he said.
"Yeah."
"Is it about Jackson's mum?"
Grace looked at him. "What makes you ask that?"
He picked at the cushion seam. "Jackson said his mum knows people are asking about her. He said she's not worried." He kept his eyes on the cushion. "He said she's been waiting for a long time and she's good at waiting."
The room was very quiet.
"When did he tell you this?" Grace kept her voice even with an effort.
"Yesterday. At lunch." He looked up. "I've been trying to be nicer to him. Like you said."
She hadn't said that exactly. She'd said how do you think Jackson feels when you leave him out in the car one morning and Oliver had received it in the way he received things he didn't want to hear, which was in silence and then apparently filed away for later use. She felt a complicated rush of something — pride in him, love for him, fear for him, the particular cocktail of parenting a child who was better than you expected when it mattered.
"That was good of you," she said.
Oliver nodded. Then: "Mum, what's wrong with Jackson's mum?"
Grace looked at her son. She thought about the voice behind the door and the amber light and come inside and I'll tell you and all the things she hadn't said at the meeting and all the things she didn't know yet.
"I'm not sure," she said. Which was true. Which was the most honest thing she'd said about any of this.
Oliver seemed to accept it. He turned back to the television. She sat in the armchair and watched him watch it and felt the love for him in her body and thought about what it meant that Jackson had said his mother was waiting and wasn't worried and was good at it.
She ordered the pizza.
She sat with Oliver while they ate it and watched the second half of a film neither of them had seen the beginning of and let Oliver explain the plot as best he could piece it together, which was one of her favourite things they did together, this collaborative reconstruction of stories from the middle.
She put him to bed at eight thirty.
She went downstairs.
She poured herself a glass of wine and sat at the kitchen table and opened her laptop and looked at the address on Renner Street on the map for a long time.
Come inside and I'll tell you.
She thought about what they knew. The message, the file, the town of Merritt, the face in the window, the footprints, the voice. She thought about what they didn't know, which was the larger category, the one that mattered — what MM actually wanted, what November 14th actually meant, what happened when you went inside.
She thought about what Kate had said. It's a lure.
She thought about the thing she hadn't told them.
She finished the wine.
She went to bed and lay in the dark and made herself think about it clearly, without flinching, without the reasonable practical distance she'd been maintaining since the beginning. She made herself look at it directly.
MM had told her to come inside.
And Grace had wanted to.
Not out of recklessness. Not out of the horror film stupidity of walking toward the danger, the thing she'd always watched on screen and thought don't, you idiot, don't. This was different. This was a pull she hadn't expected and still didn't have a clean explanation for — something in the voice, something in the certainty of it, the absolute still patience of something that had been in that house for a very long time and had decided, specifically, on her.
She stared at the ceiling.
She thought about Monday. The police station, David and the others, the statement, the formal process. She thought about six days.
She thought about Oliver telling her Jackson had said his mum was good at waiting.
She got up.
She told herself she was getting water. She went downstairs and got the water and stood at the kitchen bench and looked at her keys on the hook by the door and stood there for a long time and then went back upstairs and got back into bed.
She did not take the keys.
She was awake until three. Then she slept, finally, sudden and deep the way sleep sometimes came after you'd held something off long enough, and she didn't dream, or if she did she didn't remember it.
Sunday was ordinary in the way that days before things sometimes were, she'd think later. She took Oliver to his swimming lesson. She did the washing. She called her mother and had the same conversation they always had, the comfortable circular loop of it, and felt the reliable warmth of her mother's voice doing what it always did. She made a roast because she felt like a roast, because it was cold outside and the house needed the smell of something slow-cooking in it.
Oliver set the table without being asked, which happened maybe twice a year and always moved her disproportionately.
They ate. She cleaned up. She watched Oliver do his reading with approximately half his attention and let it go because it was Sunday and some battles weren't worth Sunday.
She put him to bed.
She sat downstairs.
Her phone buzzed. Kate: I've added two more pages to the summary for tomorrow. Call me if you want to go through it tonight.
Grace typed back: Tomorrow is fine. See you at nine.
She put the phone down.
She sat in the quiet of the house and listened to it and thought about the police station tomorrow and the statement and the six days and whether any of it was going to be fast enough or thorough enough or whether the system that David Ben had been feeding information into for months was actually capable of moving at the speed this required.
She didn't know.
She did know that she was going. She was going to the police station and she was going to give a statement and she was going to do the right, sensible, reasonable thing because that was who she was and it had served her well for forty years and there was no good reason to stop now.
She turned the lights off downstairs.
She was at the bottom of the stairs when her phone buzzed again.
She looked at it.
Unknown number.
Her whole body went still.
She looked at the number for a moment. Different to the one from the group chat — longer, differently formatted, like a number from somewhere else, somewhere she couldn't place.
She answered it.
Silence first. That same static, that same quality of sound through water. And then breathing, slow and even, close to the microphone, and Grace stood at the bottom of her stairs with the dark house above her and waited.
The voice, when it came, was the same as it had been on the doorstep. Low, unhurried, certain.
"Monday will be too late," it said.
The line went dead.
Grace stood there.
She looked at the dark stairs. She looked at her keys on the hook.
She thought about Oliver asleep above her. She thought about the others — Jessica and Gerald and Kate — sleeping in their houses, not knowing about this call, not knowing about come inside and I'll tell you, not knowing about the thing she'd been keeping back since the meeting.
She thought about Monday.
She thought about six days becoming five.
She took her keys off the hook.
She told herself she was just going to drive past. She told herself that clearly and firmly in the no-negotiation voice and she knew, even as she told herself, that it wasn't true, that she'd known since Friday night on that doorstep that she was going back and that the only question had been when.
She opened the front door.
The night was cold and clear and completely still and at the end of it, twelve minutes away on streets she now knew well enough to drive without thinking, a house sat with its curtains closed and its amber light burning and something inside it that had been waiting for a very long time and was, apparently, done waiting.
She got in the car.