message had come through during Martha’s meeting with Toby yesterday, and she’d had to read it over several times, hardly able to believe she was so easily back in contact with her old friend. When Toby had returned with their coffees she’d handed him her phone, inviting him to read it too. “That’s great,” he’d said, and at the time she had agreed, yes, it was great that Liv was happy to help them. But something had unsettled her all the same. She supposed it wasn’t unimaginable that Liv’s formality was simply her unease making its way into her written words. Certainly, Liv would be shaken up by her letter, so it was natural her tone might be a bit off-key. But did Liv harbor any ill feeling toward Martha? Their relationship had all but evaporated with the disappearance of Juliet; was it possible that Liv held Martha in some way responsible? Or was this just Martha’s own guilt rearing itself, making her question herself and everyone around her?
She had slept on it, and by the time she rose at five this morning she’d got it straight in her head. Of course Liv sounded different: eighteen years was a lifetime ago. I’ve changed, Martha told herself. Liv has changed. Everything has changed. She had tapped out a brief response, purposely warming up her own tone, trying to inject something of their old dynamic into her words:
Liv! So great to hear from you! I can’t tell you how relieved I am that my letter found you. So you’re a bereavement counselor now? Wow, that really is impressive, though it doesn’t surprise me at all. You always were a good listener. Totally understand about your work commitments, so yes, why don’t I put together some starter questions and send them over to you in the next day or two? Perhaps we could meet up when you’re back in the country? Mart xx
Mart. No one but Liv and Juliet ever called her Mart. She hated it if anyone else tried to abbreviate her name in the same way; it sounded overfamiliar coming from anyone but her best friends. With them it had been different. Olivia was Liv, Juliet was Jules, and Martha was Mart. Martha feels reality tip every time she allows herself to voyage deeper into the memories of that era, and her breath catches as the train she’s now traveling on comes to a halt and Toby nudges her to get off.
Toby has made contact with Juliet’s father, and together Martha and he have taken the Northern line as far as Archway, following Toby’s mobile app to navigate the twenty minutes to Mr. Sherman’s new home on foot. It’s a ground-floor flat on a good terraced street, but not a patch on the nice detached place Juliet’s family owned when the girls were growing up. Martha feels a rush of relief that they made the decision to hold off on the camera crew until they’d had this first interview with him; it would seem so wrong, turning up here mob-handed to rake over his tragic past. Martha has been dreading this meeting more than any of the others they hope to line up over the coming days. So far they have been able to establish that Mr. Sherman—Alan, as he asked to be called when Toby and he spoke on the phone yesterday—took a sabbatical from his work as a bank manager around five years after Juliet’s disappearance to return to the family home and care for his ex-wife. It was a late diagnosis of breast cancer, for which she refused any kind of treatment, and so after four months Mr. Sherman had found himself a widower of sorts, living alone in a four-bedroom house with no income. A year later, the old family home had been sold, and he had moved here.
“How did he sound to you?” Martha asks Toby as they stop outside the front door, her finger poised over the button labeled SHERMAN.
“He sounded like a nice guy,” Toby replied, pushing at the roots of his hair. Martha suspects this is something he does when he feels uneasy. “But profoundly sad. Like a man who’s had years to become that way, if you know what I mean? Lonely, perhaps. He seemed happy to talk.”
Martha presses the buzzer, and they wait for only a few seconds before Alan Sherman opens the door, shakes them by the hand, and gestures to the back of the hall, where the door to his flat stands open. Martha is struck by the reduced size of him. Her memory of him was as a tall man, straight-backed and broad-shouldered, always in a shirt and tie, even on weekends. She would never have recognized this man as Juliet’s father. This man is stooped, all-over gray, dressed in shapeless tan cords and a brown V-neck sweater, and as she walks along the hall she wonders if she can make out anything at all of the Mr. Sherman she once knew. It seems as though his illness has altered him almost beyond recognition. But when she enters his tidy little home and he closes the door softly behind them, he turns and she sees it there, unmistakable. The same haunted look in his eyes that she saw on their very last encounter, a day eighteen years ago when he’d stood on her doorstep, pleading with her to tell the police if she knew who Juliet had been seeing. To think that that look has never left him, that Juliet’s disappearance has haunted him across the years and lives on in him still.
“We want to find out what happened to Juliet, Mr. Sherman,” Martha says. This is not how she had planned to start this conversation, this interview, but it seems suddenly imperative that she’s clear with him about their intentions. She has to say this now, now that she perhaps has the power to do something, to change something. “We want to find her. We won’t sensationalize it, I promise. The show—well, the show will simply give us a louder voice. It’ll make people listen.”
The three of them are standing close in the small space of Alan Sherman’s living room. He scrutinizes them each in turn, like a man deciphering another language, and then he unclasps his hands from where they rest at his sternum and pulls Martha toward him in a fierce embrace. From nowhere, a sob rises up in her chest and she’s a teenager again, stifling the sound against Mr. Sherman’s woolen sweater, grateful for his arms around her, mourning more than just the loss of her best friend. They all lost so much that winter. In losing Juliet, they lost their connections to one another, and over the years they must have forgotten what those connections really meant. They must have forgotten, all of them, otherwise why else would they have let them go so easily?
Mr. Sherman had always been kind to Martha. There had been an unspoken acceptance that he knew how things were for her at home, having unintentionally witnessed Martha’s family at its worst one Friday night when he’d called to pick up a textbook of Juliet’s that Martha had borrowed. Martha’s dad had been on one of his benders, roaring his rage from the far end of the flat as Martha fled through the front door, straight into the chest of Juliet’s father before he’d even had a chance to knock. Even now, she recalls the shame of that collision, the lies that poured from her mouth as she tried to explain that her parents were just mucking about, that it wasn’t a real argument, just a bit of harmless fun. Behind her the fury continued, audible even through the closed door, and she had steered Mr. Sherman away, agreeing to walk back to Juliet’s house and join them for their fish and chip supper. It wasn’t always like this, she’d wanted to say. Remember my old house? Remember when Dad wasn’t so bad?
“The textbook can wait,” Mr. Sherman had said, and even at thirteen she had understood the kindness he’d shown in just those few words.
“I’d forgotten . . .” Martha starts to say as she pulls away, but she doesn’t know where she’s going with the sentence, and she trails off with a shake of her head.
Mr. Sherman gives a small nod as he releases her, and indicates for them to take a seat while he puts the kettle on for tea.
“Are you OK?” Toby whispers when they’re alone, but Martha waves his sympathy away with a flick of her hand, telling him to get his notes out. Stiffly, she sits beside him on the pale leather two-seater.
The room is warm, the heat on at full blast; Martha loosens the collar of her shirt and shrugs off her jacket. I can do this, she tells herself, drawing strength as the adult Martha returns, the grown-up, prime-time Martha. It’s something she unwittingly mastered in childhood, the ability to go from broken to unbreakable in the matter of minutes, to present a smiling mask of resilience to the outside world while beneath the surface all might be far from well. I can do this. Within moments she is focused again, and quietly she and Toby run through the questions they have prepared, ready for Mr. Sherman when
