Her parents' house in Bristol smelled exactly as it always had — old books and her mother's lavender candle and the particular warmth of a house that had been well-lived in. Jane sat at the kitchen table with a cup of tea and her parents on either side and told them a version of events that was entirely true and strategically incomplete.
She had been taken. She had been treated well. She was safe. The situation had been resolved. She could not tell them more, not yet, and she was sorry for the worry she had caused.
Her mother cried again. Her father held her hand. Emily, her younger sister, who was home from university for the weekend, sat across the table and looked at Jane with the particular eighteen-year-old combination of hero worship and alarm and then said: "Was he fit?"
"Emily!" their mother said.
"What? I'm just asking the important questions."
Jane laughed — a real laugh, the kind that surprised her — and didn't answer. But she was smiling when she didn't answer, and Emily, who was sharp and observant in the way of younger siblings, filed this away with obvious satisfaction.
That night, Jane lay in her childhood bed and looked at the ceiling she'd stared at through a thousand ordinary nights and thought about the extraordinary thing that had happened to her, and what was on the other side of it, and felt — with cautious, careful clarity — that she was not the same person who had stood at the window of her flat that Sunday afternoon wondering why fine felt like an insult.
She was, she thought, something with more edges. Something that had been tested and found that it held.
She was also, somewhat inconveniently, looking forward to Monday with an intensity that was probably disproportionate.