“They’re here!” Tamsin calls to her husband, who emerges from a different room. Mark is tall, broad. His shirt hugs his frame. He looks like a commercial for a certain sort of manhood, a certain sort of success. He kisses Cate, fist pumps Sam. A watch the size of a small mammal grips his wrist.

“Would you like a drink?” Tamsin ushers Cate towards an armchair. “Water?”

“Actually,” says Cate, “I’d love a wine. A red wine. If that’s OK?” Her voice sounds odd. She has hardly used it today. “I’d love a small red wine,” she says again, giving each syllable equal weight, as though speaking a language that is new to her.

“Mark!” barks Tamsin. “Glass of red for Cate.”

“Coming up.” Mark moves towards the kitchen counter, behind which cabinets are lit from within, and pours wine from an open bottle into a goblet. He looks like a mortician, standing behind his slab, dealing in blood.

“There,” Mark says, bringing it over and setting it on the glass table before her. “Put some color in your cheeks.” And he laughs. And Tamsin laughs. And Sam laughs. And Cate laughs too, though at what she is not quite sure. Both Tamsin and Mark are deeply tanned. Their teeth are extraordinarily white against their skin. She remembers now Sam telling her—they have recently been on holiday. She can bring it up later, when she is at a loss for something to say.

“Antipasto,” says Tamsin, lifting a plate where meats and cheese and olives glisten in the bluish light.

Cate takes an olive and rolls its saltiness on her tongue.

Outside is a large garden, all grass; beyond it, a fold in the hills where the river runs. The Great Stour, the same river that runs behind their house—she knows this because they walked there together, she and Sam and Tamsin and Mark, when they came down the first time to get a sense of the area.

Let’s walk through the orchard! Tamsin had said. And so they did, the route taking them over the lane, past the wholesaler, past the cabins housing the fruit pickers with the numbers spray-painted on the sides, the dartboards, the mothers on camping chairs with their babies in their laps, watching them warily, the radios, the sound of Russian being spoken, then the orchard, which was simply lines and lines of trees. It was summer and the trees stood penned, grafted onto wire, their arms stretched in supplication, or defeat. It’s not an orchard, she wanted to say, it’s a factory farm.

“So how was your holiday?” she asks, turning back to the room.

“Oh, amazing,” says Tamsin. “We were in Turkey. All-inclusive. The kids loved it. They were gone from breakfast until dinner. Had the run of the place.”

“Where are they?” Cate has the sudden terrible thought that they have been left somewhere, forgotten.