PrologueThe missing boy is 10-year-old Alfie Risby, and to be perfectly honest with you, he’s a little shit.
I realize that’s a horrible thing to say about a child, particularly one who is missing. But - and I’m not proud of this - if I had to choose a boy in Dylan’s class to vanish in broad daylight, Alfie would’ve been top of my list.
There are some kids you just kind of want to punch, and Alfie was one of them. Perhaps it was his hair - that pale red shade we used to call strawberry blonde. Or his dull, raisin-coloured eyes. Or the way his sharp little teeth gave him a distinctly ferret-like appearance.
Their sharpness is a point of fact: Last year he bit his nanny, Cecilia, so hard she needed stitches. For weeks, she appeared at afternoon pick-up like a sad ghost, clutching her bandaged forearm.
The one time I volunteered to chaperone a school trip, a class picnic to Hampstead Heath, Alfie leaned over a plate of sausage rolls and told me, very casually, as if we were two adults at a bar, that he ‘quite liked my slag fingernails.’
And then there was his family. They weren’t just run-of-the-mill, St. Angeles rich. They were in a whole other league.
‘Like richer than God,’ one of the other mothers had whispered to me during last year’s spring fundraiser, as we arranged sugar cookies on tiny plastic trays.
But if I’m being honest, my feelings about Alfie had nothing to do with his hair or his wealth or his ferret teeth. No. My dislike of Alfie stemmed entirely from the way he treated Dylan, my precocious, sensitive only son, like he was a bug to be crushed.
And nobody crushes my kid.
Copyright © 2025 by Sarah Harman. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
