Then You Were Gone

As she attempted to place everything back in the drawer at the precise angle it had previously been she saw a corner of beige paper, a grid marked on it in red ink. There was only one kind of official document that looked like that. She slipped it swiftly out of the pile. Afterwards she would ask herself what she was hoping to find. What, after all, can really be gleaned from a person’s birth certificate? Maybe she was conscious on some level of what Ayanna had told them, conscious that Mack leaving his birth certificate behind might be significant purely because he no longer needed it; because that person on the certificate was no longer him.

But she gazed at it for several moments and still the letters and numbers on it made no sense. This was not Mack’s birth certificate. It was not even the birth certificate of another man, one Mack might have been pretending to be. This was a woman’s birth certificate. A woman called Jessica Maria Novak. But then, as Simone continued to look at the letters, the numbers, the dates, she realised this was not even the birth certificate of a woman. It was a girl, a seventeen-year-old girl.