‘Five minutes. Where’s Leo, do you know?’ Karen calls after Sigrid, who leaves the room with a sigh.

‘Here.’

The voice behind her gives her a start.

‘Aren’t we jumpy? Feeling guilty about something?’

He puts his hands on her shoulders and leans down to look at the screen. Stubble against her cheek, a faint whiff of cigarette smoke.

‘Finding anything?’

‘Not yet,’ Karen says. ‘Nothing to explain where Luna might have gone, anyway. Unless she’s hiding in the annex, of course,’ she adds. ‘Oh no, right, Luna would probably never stoop to visit such a humble abode.’

The hands disappear from her shoulders, the warmth from her cheek.

‘What the hell is your problem with her? I didn’t realise you were such a hypocrite, Karen. Didn’t you just tell Sigrid something about giving people a chance?’

‘I guess you prefer sanctimonious to hypocritical,’ Karen snaps. ‘I never thought you would be the type to fall for someone so holier-than-thou, but the two of you look awfully chummy in these pictures.’

‘Well, I suppose that tends to happen with people you’ve known for twenty-five years, no? The bond’s still there even if you haven’t seen each other in a long time.’

‘You must have missed her terribly,’ Karen mutters, then slams her laptop shut and gets to her feet.

‘I did, actually. Is that a problem for you? Or have you never missed anyone you used to love? Do you just dump people and move on?’

He regrets the words the moment they leave his lips, she can tell, knows he’s not referring to John or Mathis, that he would never use them to hurt her. Wants to tell him she knows that but doesn’t. For a brief moment she opened the door, made herself vulnerable, and now she’s trying to close it again just as quickly.

But the realisation has already slipped through the crack.

It’s not the memory of the family she once had that’s making her throat close up, not what is forever lost. Right now, in this moment, it’s not losing the people who are already gone. It’s losing Leo.

The unspoken possibility, the never-named intimacy, the cautious exploration of what might be.

What might have been.

Now, everything inside her is screaming that this is what she wanted. For it not to go beyond what she’d expected. What she’d been able to imagine. A few friendly fucks, two bodies coming together to keep loneliness at bay, practical and thirst-quenching, nothing more than that. She has done it many times before, with many different men. None of them has ever made her miss the people she lost one bit less.

Now, standing in the middle of the kitchen, her mouth hanging open, she realises she hasn’t thought about John since . . . when?

Her guilt morphs into anger.