Little Girl Gone: The can’t-put-it-down psychological thriller. Alexandra Burt

cancer. She had surgery but they just stitched her back up, there was nothing they could do. Eventually the cancer spread to her brain and her liver.’

      I thought about my own family and how my mother didn’t seem to feel any guilt pursuing her photography career. I remembered all the nights without dinner on the table and the door to the darkroom locked. Many years after my parents died in a car accident, I still couldn’t make up my mind if I should feel cheated out of her attention or happy for her to have had a career of her own.

      That night, we broke the 30-days-no-sex rule and made love for the first time. It was a chaotic mess of fidgeting with the condom wrapper and not knowing where to put our legs. When I woke up the next morning, Jack was sitting in bed, furiously writing in a notebook.

      ‘Are you writing me a poem?’ I asked jokingly.

      ‘A speech,’ he said. Jack had been selected to deliver the keynote speech for an annual function sponsored by the New York City Bar Association for over eight hundred law students. For the next two weeks he outlined the speech, then revised it, just to start all over again. The night of the event I watched him deliver the speech. He spoke with confidence, made eye contact, and told anecdotes and jokes. There wasn’t even a hint of anxiety in his voice or his demeanor and later I found out that speaking in front of crowds wasn’t his problem at all.

      On our way to the event room, Jack excused himself, drops of perspiration emerging from his hairline. People were asking for him, wanting to meet the bright young attorney who had delivered such an inspiring and confident speech. I waited in front of the bathroom, checked the coatroom and behind the stage, but Jack had all but disappeared. His cell went to voicemail and I finally decided to hail a cab and go home. I found him vomiting behind a portaloo in a construction zone in the parking lot.

      Jack was covered in sweat and mumbled something about an upset stomach. ‘Go in and let my boss know I have a stomach virus,’ he said in one uninterrupted breath and then continued to dry heave. I always doubted the explanation and wondered if it wasn’t about speaking in public but having to mingle with people afterwards that did him in.

      ‘A slight bout of anxiety. Not a big deal, I’m working on it,’ he confessed later. ‘I prefer a courtroom to a cocktail party. Can we drop it now?’

      Jack was unpredictable in many ways. He was confident on one hand, yet socially inept on the other. I observed a temper when things went out of control but Jack’s attitude was covert to anyone who didn’t know him. As moody as he was, he didn’t take kindly to people who exhibited the same characteristics; if I seemed grumpy, he assumed I was mad with him – no other explanation occurred to him. There were battles I chose not to fight, and I learned early on which ones those were.

      A few months later, I told Jack I might be pregnant. There was an unsure smile and a long silence as we waited for the test results. I watched him pace around the room while the minutes passed slowly; there was so much sincerity in him and it felt as if we’d known each other forever. By the time the faint pink line appeared in the result window, reality started to set in. Before I fully comprehended what just happened, happiness spread across his face. I remember thinking he’s the person I want to love forever.

      ‘Let’s get married,’ he said.

      ‘Don’t do this because of what your father did, Jack,’ I said and wished I hadn’t said it out loud. Jack’s face seemed to melt, his eyes turned big, wounded almost. He recovered quickly and smiled at me.

      ‘What my father did is irrelevant. I don’t allow other people’s shortcomings to affect my life decisions. You have to remove yourself from that. But …’ his voice became gentle and he held my face and kissed me, ‘my child won’t be raised by another man.’

      Like shells on a beach I collected my feelings; there was excitement and joy – I loved Jack, of that I was sure – and trepidation. Apprehension that we were making the right decision, that I was about to become the most important person in someone’s life, and then there was sheer confusion. I had never asked myself if I wanted to be a mother. Becoming Jack’s wife wasn’t that far of a stretch but motherhood seemed almost alien. My mind attempted to make a switch from pregnancy to baby, from I’m pregnant to I’m going to be a mother, and everything about that seemed to leave me raw, like sunburned skin, and the fact that I felt inadequate, even at that moment, would emerge again and again in the months that followed.

      We went to the courthouse and married in front of the Justice of the Peace. No white stretch limousine, no heaving of the bridal bouquet into a group of shrieking bridesmaids, no rice, no festivities, no honeymoon. No father-in-law telling Jack to take good care of his daughter. No family to toast the bride and groom. Jack wasn’t big on celebrations and it was all the same to me. I decided to keep my maiden name and Jack didn’t put up a fight. Later I thought about it and realized maybe it was my way of holding on to my family that I had lost a long time ago? I didn’t dwell on it.

      The courthouse clerk took a photo of us, the only one we have of our wedding day. We didn’t ask, the clerk basically insisted.

      Later, months later, as I flipped through our only photo album, it occurred to me that there were so few pictures of us they were almost not worth organizing. A picture of us in front of a Christmas tree at Jack’s law firm, our smiles bright, Jack’s bowtie and starched shirt immaculate, my hair slightly ruffled, my eyes somewhat cast with the effects of too many martinis. We won a trip to the Bahamas that day, but Jack donated the tickets to a charity because he couldn’t take any time off. One on New Year’s Eve, table decorations of upturned black top hats, confetti in our hair. The only memory of that night’s the hangover I had the next day.

      In our wedding picture Jack wore a black suit and a dark blue tie. I was in a cotton dress, white, versatile, appropriate for many occasions. The pregnancy wasn’t showing yet, my stomach was still flat. In the picture, Jack’s got his arm around my shoulder, allowing me to lean into him. Behind us on the wall, a blueprint of the original courthouse layout, the light colored lines on the blue background reminiscent of prints on my father’s study wall. In the left corner of the photo, even though I tried to crop it out later, the hallway courthouse bench, Jack’s briefcase photobombing us from the edge of the photograph.

      We always meant to find a special frame for the wedding photo, but it was to remain in its original frame. Plain black wood. We never really thought about it anymore.

      On the day of the 20 weeks scan, we were ushered into a small examination room. I glanced at the screen mounted above the keyboard.

      ‘Hi, I’m Debra.’ A woman in a spotless pink uniform entered. ‘Before we get started,’ she said and vigorously pushed buttons on the keyboard, ‘would you like to know the sex of your baby?’

      The sex of our baby. I looked down at myself, anxiously scanning the small bump protruding from my abdomen. So far I was hardly showing and the fact that there was a human inside of me, however small, seemed inconceivable, let alone the fact that it was a boy or a girl.

      ‘Yes, we’d like to know,’ Jack said.

      The truth was that I hadn’t decided if I wanted to know the sex and the fact that he answered for me made me furious. Furious that he was speaking on my behalf. But I knew that if I was to question him later, he’d just come up with an example of what I had said to make him believe that I wanted to know, that it was a good idea, that we had agreed, and knowing the sex was the right thing to do.

      The nurse looked at me and I nodded and managed a smile. She got up and turned off the lights. The room was warm and intimate and the dark allowed me to blink away the tears that had formed in my eyes.

      ‘I apologize, this is going to be cold,’ Debra said as she squeezed gel on my belly so cold that it made me shiver. Jack reached for my hand and together we stared at what looked like a triangular slice on a pitch-black background.

      ‘Here we go,’ Debra said and put the head of the wand on my abdomen. ‘That’s the spine,’ she said and pushed harder to get a better picture.

      My baby’s spine, tiny little bones in