The Astonishing Return of Norah Wells Read Online Free Page B

across the top:
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    Please Sponsor me: Ella Wells
    I’m running for: The British Heart Foundation.
    Running, playing the trumpet, keeping Norah’s clothes.
She’s been waiting for me
, Norah thinks
. She still loves me.
    Then she notices the pinboard filled with Adam’s portraits, the ones missing from the stairs – and others too, pulled from their frames, ripped out of photo albums, pinned up, one overlapping the other, dozens of them staring down at Ella’s desk.
    Norah recognises the one of her and Ella with medals round their necks after the mothers and daughters’ race at Holdingwell Primary Sports Day. And there’s another photo she remembers too, from Ella’s naming ceremony. They’d held it in a field outside Holdingwell; she’d wanted to be outside, under the bright blue sky – no rooms, no walls. Norah scans the faces: Fay, Ella’s godmother, stands in the middle of the group wearing a pale pink dress; she’s holding baby Ella in her arms, looking at her as though no one else in the world exists. Fay’s love for them all – it’s why Norah gave her Willa to look after on the day she left. She hopes her best friend has stayed in their lives.
    Norah takes the picture off the pinboard. There’s something not right with the image. She holds it up closer. A mark, so faint you don’t see it at first. Someone has scratched a black cross over Fay’s face.

Ella
    Â 
    @findingmum
    Nearly home! #bestdayever
    Ella’s been training so hard for the 10k that the short distance between school and home shouldn’t leave her out of breath, but her heart pounds against her ribcage and sweat runs down the back of her school shirt. Waiting for the bus would have taken too long, and it would have been far too slow anyway.
    As she runs past Holdingwell Primary she remembers the day she stood at the gates waiting for Mum to come and collect her. How cold it was. How the minutes seemed like hours. And then the days and weeks and months and years that followed. How she kept having nightmares. How she couldn’t watch films about people who’d been kidnapped, about psychos who locked women in their basements for twenty years, because they’d flood her head with bad pictures of what might have happened to Mum.
    Ella blinks. None of that matters, not now that Mum’s home.
    She sees Willa walking across the playground to the girls’ loos, her head bowed, her jagged red fringe falling into her eyes. How are they going to tell her?
    Mum will find a way to explain, she’ll have a plan.
    When Ella gets to the post office she stops to catch her breath and sends another tweet. There’s a stream of messages waiting for her. She scans for her favourite follower: @onmymind showed up on her Twitter account a year ago. She always posts replies.
    Â 
    @findingmum Really excited for you. Keep us posted
    There’s another one too, from @sunnysideofthestreet. Ella thinks he started following her because she tweets about jazz and he likes Louis Armstrong, like Mum. He replies in weird phrases: some are song lyrics and others just seem random. We have all the time in the world
,
he wrote this time. Which irritates Ella. Who’s to say Mum will still be at the house? After six years of waiting Ella’s going to get back to Mum as fast as her legs will carry her.
    And then @liliesandroses, the Pegg sisters from across the road: #theastonishingreturn , they’d written. So they’d seen Mum too.
    She looks into the post office window and spots Sai standing behind the counter with his mum. The post office is where Ella and Sai met. She had come in one day, to post some letters to missing persons associations around the world, thinking that maybe whoever had taken Mum had left the country and taken her to one of those foreign places where it’s really hard to trace people. Ella wishes she could tell Sai what happened this