Looking for JJ

The news about Jennifer Jones’ move to Holland breaks a few days after Frankie leaves. The newspapers all run upsetting headlines, and Alice feels burdened and anxious with the news. While flipping through the newspapers at work, Alice glimpses her mother’s face in a different article. The article claims that Carol isn’t allowed to see her daughter. Alice tears out the picture and puts it in her pocket before returning the newspaper.

Alice reflects on her conversations with Pat when she was still at Monksgrove, the facility where she was kept after her trial. Pat details her unstable childhood and tries to make sure that she hasn’t been hurt or physically abused. Jennifer is confused and frustrated, thinking that, although there had been no abuse, “she’d just been sidelined, forgotten about. She’d been left with friends and family, the social services, complete strangers; finally when there was no one else she’d just been left on her own” (106)

Back in the coffee shop, Alice is counting inventory in the stock room. She takes out the photo again and reflects on how her mother had abandoned her as a child. Alice throws the picture in the trash. At the counter, she serves the detective, who says that he’s ending the investigation.

When Alice returns home, Rosie and her mother Kathy are having coffee. Alice is elated that the detective is leaving and that things will smooth over. They talk about vacationing in Majorca at Kathy’s house there, and Rosie offers to drive her mother home. Rosie and Kathy leave, and Alice heads to the bedroom, where she has partially packed a bag to go and visit Frankie. She reflects on “how lucky she was. […] And yet the past was there. It always would be” (113).

She thinks about what her future might look like and what it means to live a good life despite her past. She wonders:

[I]s this what she meant by a good life? […] Is this enough? To go to work every day? To have friends? To become educated? For what, in the end? To become a wife, a mother? Would it be better if she went abroad and worked among the hungry and the desperate? If she could prevent others from suffering and dying, would that make up for what she did six years before on Berwick Waters? Would it then be a life for a life? (113).

Rosie returns from the drive, bringing Sara with her. Sara reveals to Alice and Rosie that she is a reporter for a newspaper and has discovered Alice’s identity as Jennifer Jones. Sara is writing a book about the case and its aftermath and has been studying Alice for weeks. Sara reveals that the story is going to print in only a few weeks and suggests that Alice might want to have her own say in the story. Alice and Rosie are both devastated by the news.