Page 10 of Stolen

There’s a slightly awkward pause.

‘Lottie must be excited,’ Harriet says, finally.

My daughter is the one place where Harriet and I meet. She adores Lottie and, even though she and I don’t talk often, Lottie often hijacks my iPad so they can FaceTime.

I glance at Lottie, who isn’t sitting on the sunlounger as instructed, but weaving in and out of the neat rows of gilt chairs, arms spread as if she’s pretending to be a plane, and getting under the feet of the hotel staff.

‘It’s Lottie,’ I say. ‘It’s hard to tell.’

I’m surprised to hear the sound of a flight announcementin the background of the call. ‘Are you at the airport?’ I ask. ‘Where are you going?’

‘It’s just the TV,’ Harriet says. ‘Look, I’ve got to go. I just wanted to be sure everything was OK. Take lots of photos of Lottie for me, won’t you?’

‘Of course,’ I say.

I slip my phone back into my shorts and turn back along the beach, and see my daughter talking to a man I’ve never met.

His hand is on her shoulder and something about the way he’s leaning over her sets every maternal alarm bell ringing. I call Lottie’s name loudly and the man glances in my direction and then briskly walks away. By the time I reach Lottie, he’s already disappearing around the side of the hotel.

‘Who was that?’ I demand of my daughter.

‘I don’t know.’

‘What have I told you about talking to strangers?’

‘I wasn’t talking to him.Hewas talking tome.’

‘What did he want?’

She glares at me, clearly irked. ‘He said he couldn’t find his little girl, and asked if I’d seen her.’

A shiver runs down my spine. Lottie is smart and intelligent, and I’ve drummed into her the dangers posed by strange men, but she’s still not yet four. I was less than fifteen metres away from her; I only took my eyes off her for a few moments.

I frogmarch her back to the hotel, ignoring her furious yanks on my arm. I should have kept a closer eye on her: Florida has one of the highest numbers of sex offenders of all fifty American states. Its population, which comprises a significant number of tourists and retirees from other states, is transient and in a constant state of flux. There’s little sense of community and it’s an easy place to get lost in the crowd.

I’m a lawyer. I looked it up.

As we reach the hotel lobby, Lottie finally breaks free from me and races over to join the cluster of little girls who’ll be bridesmaids with her. I’m about to go after her when Marc’s sister, Zealy, steps out of the hotel lift.

‘Alex! I thought it was you! You’ve had your hair cut.’

Reflexively, I touch the back of my head. I had a good eight inches lopped off my long hair last month, so that it now sits just below my collarbone; I just didn’t have the time to style it properly before. ‘It was driving me mad. Do you like it?’

‘I love it. It really suits you.’

Zealy and I have been friends for years, although we don’t see each other as often as I’d like; my fault, of course. Those friendships that weren’t crushed by my workload fell by the wayside once I had Lottie. Zealy is actually Marc’s half-sister, from his mother’s first marriage to a black South African. The first time Sian met her, she asked if she could touch Zealy’s hair and remarked how wild it was she ‘sounded so white’.

Zealy loops her arm through mine. ‘Come have a drink with me in the bar,’ she says. ‘Help me drown my sorrows.’

I don’t let her lure me into the bar, but I do yield to a cocktail by the pool, keeping a close eye on Lottie’s bright platinum head as she and the other little girls dart back and forth around us like dragonflies.

I’m in two minds about whether to report Lottie’s encounter with the man on the beach to the police, or at least to hotel management. The more I think about it, the odder it seems.

But I’ve nothing concrete to offer them. If every mother who ever had a ‘bad feeling’ filed a police report, they’d be drowning in paperwork.

I accept a second martini when Zealy presses me, and put the incident to the back of my mind.