Part one

On Monday 5 October, at 6:50 a.m., I dropped my daughter off outside Charleroi-South station.

She had asked me to leave her there rather than at school. A friend was picking her up, she said, and they’d go to the coach together. She had her big red suitcase, her checked scarf and the little silver pendant she never takes off, the one with an “E” engraved on it. She kissed me on the cheek, very quickly, the way you do at sixteen when you’re afraid someone might be watching.

“Send me a message from Paris,” I said.

“Yes, Mum. Promise.”

At 8:40, the deputy head of the school phoned me. The coach had left at 7:30. She just wanted to check that Emma was ill, because they hadn’t received a doctor’s note.

Emma had never got on the coach.

I called her phone. Voicemail. I called ten more times. Voicemail. I called Benoît, my husband, who was on a building site in Gosselies. He said “I’m coming” and hung up without saying goodbye.

I called the friend. She had never planned to pick Emma up. She didn’t know anything. She was crying on the phone, which frightened me even more.

By ten o’clock we were at the police station. A fairly young, very calm inspector took notes. He asked me for a recent photo. I opened my gallery and realised that almost all the photos I had were of her as a little girl. She hadn’t let anyone take her picture for two years.

“Does she have a boyfriend?” the inspector asked.

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

I wasn’t sure of anything any more.

“Is there anything else we should know?”

Benoît looked at me. I said:

“Emma was adopted. At three months old. She’s always known. It’s not an issue in our family.”

The inspector wrote something down. He didn’t say anything. But I saw that he underlined it.

We went home, to Montignies, to wait. We had been told to stay reachable, to check her room, her computer, everything.

I hadn’t been into Emma’s room for weeks. She kept the door shut. She said “knock knock, Mum” when I wanted to come in, and I respected that, because my own mother never knocked.

The bed was made. That was strange in itself. On the desk, her exercise books were arranged by colour, and there was a note folded in two, placed right in the middle.

“Don’t worry. I’ll be home tonight. I’ll explain. I love you. E.”

Benoît read it over my shoulder. He sat down on the bed, his head in his hands.

“Tonight,” he repeated. “She’ll be home tonight. So why did she take a suitcase for five days?”

He was right. It made no sense.

I opened the drawers. I felt like a thief. In the third one, under some winter jumpers, I found a cardboard box: a phone. A second phone, a small, cheap model, with a receipt from a shop in the lower town. Dated March.

Seven months.

The box was empty. She had taken the phone with her.

I sat down on the floor, against the radiator, and thought back over those seven months. The little things. Emma going out into the garden to phone “a friend”. Emma asking to keep her birthday money instead of putting it in her savings account. Emma who, one evening in June, had asked me without looking at me if I had kept “any papers from when I was a baby”. I had said no, there was hardly anything, and changed the subject. She hadn’t pushed it.

I had lied. Maybe she already knew.

On the family computer, Emma had forgotten to log out of an email account I didn’t know about. Not her own address. Another one: “emma.r.2010”.

R. Our surname begins with a D.

There were very few messages. Adverts. An account confirmation from a social network. And an email from the Belgian railways, sent the night before: a single ticket, Charleroi-South, 7:04. Destination: Mouscron, changing at Tournai.

One way.

I called the inspector. He said he’d alert his colleagues in Mouscron, and that we should stay at home in case she came back. Benoît said he would stay. I already had my keys in my hand.

I didn’t know anyone in Mouscron.

At least, that’s what I told Benoît.

On the motorway, I drove too fast. I thought of all the stories you read in the papers. Teenage girls who meet someone online. Fake profiles. Forty-year-old men pretending to be seventeen-year-old boys.

And then I thought about the letter R.

When we went to collect Emma, sixteen years ago, from the Ambroise Paré hospital in Mons, she was three months old and fitted in a yellow blanket. The social worker had given us a little paper bag. Inside was the silver pendant with the “E”. “It’s from her birth mother,” she had said. “She’d like Emma to have it one day.” We had given it to her on her twelfth birthday. She had never taken it off since.

What I had never told Emma, or anyone else, not even Benoît, was that in the paper bag there had also been a little slip of paper. With a first name, an address in Mouscron, and one sentence.

I put that address into the satnav. I had known it by heart for sixteen years.

At 2:10 p.m., I parked in a little street behind the main square, outside a narrow house with green shutters. I sat in the car for two minutes, my hands on the wheel. Then I went and rang the bell.

I heard footsteps. Laughter. Emma’s voice, just behind the door, saying “I’ll get it”.

The door opened. It wasn’t Emma standing on the threshold.

It was a woman of about thirty, with the same eyes as my daughter. She looked at me. She went pale. And she said my first name.