Now You See Me by Emma Haughton Page A

psychologist, a man with wiry hair and huge bushy eyebrows. He listed the main ones: bullying at school, stress, depression, addiction, and physical or sexual abuse. I caught Maisy and Lianna exchanging a wide-eyed look, and my cheeks flamed – Martha and Paul were certainly watching this over at Dial House.
    Could any of those things be true? I wondered, as they switched to an interview with one of the parents. Did any apply to Danny? And if they did – if he had been depressed or bullied or somehow abused – how come I didn’t realize? How come he didn’t tell me?
    On the TV, the psychologist reappeared. While most teens ran away, he said, you could never rule out abduction.
    Another furtive look between my friends. I felt my chest tighten and I almost didn’t notice when the scene changed again. All at once I recognized the boating lake. Two kids on bikes riding around the edge of it. A girl and a boy, about my age.
    A prickly, electric sort of sensation ran through my body. Danny and me.
    Not really us of course. People pretending to be us. Which was even weirder somehow. I stared at the girl. She was exactly like me. Same light brown straggly hair and pale grey eyes, kind of skinny.
    It was like looking in the mirror. Or at the twin sister I never knew I had.
    I glanced at Dad. He was watching intently, a stiffness in his jaw, his forehead knotted into a frown. I knew just what he was thinking.
    Martha must have given them a photo.
    I looked back at the screen. Still the boating lake, but Danny and I had gone. It was last October, the policemen wading across the water, the crowd in the background. The cameraman, I thought with a frisson of panic – he hadn’t been filming for the news after all.
    I held my breath as the camera panned over the crowd, praying it woudn’t fix on me, but the image dissolved before I could even appear in shot. Now we were looking at Dial House, filmed from the bottom of the drive. The camera zoomed in slowly to the front door, then the scene switched to Martha and Paul, sitting together on the sofa in the lounge.
    â€œMartha, could you tell us how you felt when you first discovered your son had gone missing?”
    The room looked strange somehow. It took me a moment to figure out why. They’d swapped the furniture around so Martha and Paul were sitting with their backs to the window, a flat blue line of sea visible in the background.
    But it wasn’t just that. Everything looked smaller, and sort of fake, like it was a film set, a place made up for a story.
    â€œIt’s hard to describe.” Martha’s voice sounded different too – uncertain, nervous. She was wearing some kind of make-up, and her skin looked too smooth, too perfect.
    â€œAt first you don’t really believe it. You think he’s going to come back at any moment. But at the same time there’s this sense of increasing panic, this constant need to look, to try and find him.”
    She kept tugging at her hair as she spoke, pulling it back in that way that made her appear stern and angry. Paul was clearly on edge too, his thumb twitching as his wife talked. He looked like someone who would rather be anywhere but there.
    No sign of Alice.
    â€œSo at what point did you realize he wasn’t coming home?” the interviewer asked Paul.
    But it was Martha who replied, a pained expression around her eyes. “If we’d reached that point,” she snapped, “we wouldn’t be sitting here now.”
    The camera panned in on her face. “We still believe Danny will come back,” she explained. “That’s why we’re here, doing this programme. To raise awareness.” Martha paused. “Someone, somewhere, must know where he is.”
    â€œSo, if your son is watching this, Martha, what would you like to say to him?” the interviewer asked.
    Lianna and Maisy swapped “as if” looks. They’d clearly come to some