City Traffic Puzzle

Allegra stood at the window, her tiny hand clasped on the velvet curtain, toying with the dusty fabric and the varying beams of light that came through the gaps. She fiddled distractedly with her raggedy golden hair, speaking without much conclusion and never bothering to turn around. Although fearful in stature, the child was internally rather fierce and driven, much like her father.

"Why don't you ever answer any of my questions?"

She raised the end of her sentence as if it were a question, but in reality it was simply a remark, a challenge. Intelligent for her years, she knew how to provoke responses without displaying emotions, and with a man as stony as Mr Clifton in her presence, she also knew that subtlety was her safest option.

"Because I don't need to," was the dull response.

Unsure of how nearby her captor was standing, Allegra twisted her head round a little to the right, hoping that she would catch a glimpse of him before he saw the fear in her eyes.

Ten yards away.

That was alright.

Allegra shifted her gaze back onto the brightness cascading through the ever changing gap in the curtains. A miniature butterfly with markings similar to that of a tiger flew by in the street, and she wondered if it were the same butterfly she had found in the house and let free yesterday.

"I'm like the butterfly," she whispered, reasoning with herself, "I'm too small and too weak to let myself free, but I know that if I keep to myself, someone will realise I'm here and pick me off the ground."

And then, a moment later, she put a name to this saviour.

"Daddy will come and get me, maybe when he's a little bit stronger and a little bit braver. Maybe he needs to grow up a little bit more, just like me. That's okay."

Hope was in short supply that day, yet somehow it poured from the heart of this lost little child.

***

Several thousand miles away, Jack Barakat was gazing, uninterested, out another window entirely, this one rather lacking in elegance or even any delightful features. It was a fairly simple and modern structure, clear glass with a white frame, divided into quarters. Jack was not really looking out of the window, or even simply at the window - he was probably so wrapped up in his own thoughts that he did not even realise that the window or the outside world were even there at all.

Thirty missed calls, eighteen texts.

Oh, and a voicemail.

"Hello? Hey, it's Zack. Why aren't you picking up? Jack, I swear to god you're going crazy. I'd understand it if you were grieving, but this denial doesn't make sense. Alex is gone. We need to talk about this, you need to talk about this so you can let it go. Call me back, text me, anything."

Admittedly, it was horribly tempting to return the call. It sounded so easy, just crying a few shaky tears and accepting the end. Life, although a little patchy and not without pain, would go on. Jack had come so fucking close to giving up and letting the world win, but something in his heart told him that he knew what he was doing. He took the relentless pleading as a challenge on his sanity, but it didn't hurt him at all.

The only thing left to do was wait for Alex to come home.

No, wait, fuck that! Jack couldn't just wait all his life, no good would come of it.

The only thing left to do was bring Alex the fuck home.

Jack thought back to the conversations he'd had during his visits to the police station over the last couple of days. Alex was supposedly blackmailed, kidnapped and murdered by some anonymous party in London, England.

London.

Plane tickets are pretty easy to buy, right? Only takes about ten minutes to sort out on the internet.

And for the first time in days, Jack felt this overwhelming sense of motivation and reason to exist.

***

The seemingly infinite wait was slowly becoming more than Alex could handle, and another day spent perched on the edge of the bed gazing at the peeling white wallpaper was driving him almost to the point of insanity. He would tap his feet habitually and swing his legs back and forth every so often, but in reality, there was very little else there for him. He couldn't bring himself to go out for a walk, because the idea of living in normality was sickening - how could he walk up and down these streets knowing his life had been thrown into turmoil?

After several long hours, he could handle it no longer.

Alex staggered a dazed few steps across the cramped room, before crouching down to unzip the front compartment of his suitcase, from which he pulled out the mobile phone he had stuffed in there for safekeeping.

Mr Clifton's words of warning played loudly in the back of Alex's mind.

"Try and contact ANYONE and your little girl is dead."

His hands grew icy and shook violently as they struggled to tap letters into the keypad. He was breaking every single rule, risking everything including the life of his child and the tension was destroying him from the inside out.

Trust is almost like a monster, and it gives faith in the illogical and hope for the unachievable. Alex gritted his teeth, every word taking an infinite time to appear on the LCD screen in his blurry, slowed down world.

Some things are worth the risk.

Finally, after what had seemed like a decade, Alex was done typing.

One address.

One recipient.

One tiny glimmer of hope.

He pressed the send button with tears brimming in his exhausted eyes.

***

An irritating bleeping sound blared suddenly from the jumble of things strewn on the bed.

Nineteen texts.

Jack rolled his eyes and waited for the noise to pass. Not another damn text.

He ignored it and continued to pack his suitcase for London.