Instinct

27. What You Don't Know Will Kill You

Laura had never intended for her daughters to live this life.

It was unthinkable, the things they had been through. She hated to think of it all, and yet it was all she could think about. Late at night, lying alone in a cold bed, those thoughts chased each other around in circles until she was physically too tired to think anymore.

So she had thrown herself into this battle, this social – political - fight against time. If she lingered too long on the thought of her dying husband and her missing girls, it would kill her. So like a shark, she kept on swimming just to stay alive. Just to survive.

The thing was that all Laura had wanted was a family, in the beginning, when she and Matthew were young and in love. She just wanted children to share their happiness with. Just two, perhaps. God, she had wanted so badly to have a child. Just one.

And then they couldn’t conceive, and Laura thought that she could eventually come to terms with that. It wasn’t enough to tear them apart, in spite of the heartbreak they’d both been through.

Then, years later, Stephanie came along.

When Laura had first seen her, in the hospital, wrecked with exhaustion and half-insane with anticipation, her heart had swelled and she hadn’t been able to hold back tears. So many times she had thought that there’d be some complication, that something would have gone wrong, that the inevitable would strike down her chances of having a child. A daughter. Laura had held that tiny little pink newborn, so quiet, unusually so, and had turned to Matthew, brimming with untold happiness and said, “Look at her, Matt. She’s all ours.”

He had smiled back, so heartbreakingly handsome with the dark circles under his eyes and the lines on his forehead. Matthew had fallen in love for a second time the moment he laid eyes on the little body that was to be his first daughter. Taking her tiny hand in his, he’d laughed.

“Welcome to the world, little one,” he’d said. “Your mom and I have been waiting a very long time to meet you.”

Laura hadn’t thought she’d ever be able to feel that overwhelming torrent of joy again, but life had blessed her with a second child, a second daughter to share her home and her love with.

The fear had abated, dulled as the years went by – but it never went away, not once. Fear that something would happen and it would all disappear. She could tell that Matthew shared in that anxiety, but it wasn’t the same. Laura didn’t know if she could survive if something were to happen to either of her children, or her husband.

That fear, for seven years, was solely for Stephanie, until her sister was born. And maybe that’s why it always seemed to stay with her.

Maybe that’s why it all had to happen to her.

When the gunmen came and tore their family apart, wrecked their home and smothered their hope, Laura had operated on fear and instinct. Until one day, one year on from the incident, police officers had showed up on the doorstep and told them that the case would continue to be investigated, but that the likelihood of finding her daughters was severely diminished. Nonexistent.

Laura had gone to bed that night, and she didn’t get up for a week. Matthew had tried all he could to get her to, but not even he had been able to break through to her. She supposed it was a turning point in their lives, because the hits kept coming.

He got sick, a further year on from that day. He never bounced back. And then Laura was burying the last person she loved on the planet.

After that, well, she’d cordoned off the part of herself that was still wracked with grief, still struggled with her part in all of this, the what-ifs, the maybes, and she had convinced herself to move on. There were still people having their families ripped from them, and she could help make sure it never happened again.