“I’m afraid I haven’t, Mrs. White.” I imagined her standing in the vicarage front room, staring out toward the yew hedge, the vicar beside her with a crocheted blanket draped over his knees. It seemed wrong, talking to her on an iPhone. She came from a generation that knew rationing and hand-cranked their cars and had uncles who’d died in the trenches. A time of myth, it seemed now, like that of Arthur and his knights.

“It’s been four Sundays now. He always calls us on Sundays after Evensong. I’ve tried calling him but I just get the recording.”

I hesitated. My instinct was to cover for him, only I didn’t know what I was covering for. It had been my birthday, my thirty-eighth, the previous week. Usually Peter remembered and sent a text, but not this time.

“I don’t see Peter very often. We sort of move in different circles. And work is always so busy. I mean mine and Peter’s. Have you tried calling him there? Or his other friends?”

“He told us he changed jobs. I thought I wrote the name of the company down but I can’t find it. It was a foreign name, or names, a sort of string of foreign names. And he hasn’t brought anyone home in … well, in quite a while.”

No, it was unlikely that Peter would have brought anyone home.

“You were always such good friends. You and Peter. And Marcus and Emma, of course. But you and Peter were friends first. I know he always thought of you as his best friend, even after,” she paused, “everything that happened.”

Everything that happened. Peter had wanted to talk about it at the wedding, the wedding I invited him to and after which he’d disappeared, if only from Patricia.

“Have you tried googling him, I mean for his work number?”

“Googling…? No, I was hoping … you will look into it for me, Andy? You’ll find out what he’s up to, won’t you?”

After we hung up, I stared out the window. The train carriage was quiet. We raced past a string of streetlamps on an overpass, lights blurring so the night was stitched with golden thread. I wondered why I’d agreed. It might have been her calling me Andy. For well over a decade, Peter’s mother was pretty much the only person to call me by my full name. But I have been Andrea, or frequently Ms. Carter, for many years now.