She squeezes my arm and walks towards her bedroom, still dabbing at her eyes. I don’t follow her in case Meg’s in there waiting for me. Drip, drip. So I wait in the hall next to my baby pictures while Mum changes.

“You’re opening the salon today?” I’m surprised—she didn’t say anything about work. Mum set up the salon after Granddad died ten years ago. Like most of our neighbors, she sold the three-bed Victorian cottage right on the harbor, the house where she grew up, when a couple from London looking for a holiday home offered over three hundred grand. She bought our bungalow and had enough left over to set up her hair and beauty business. She called it the Style Rooms and I’ve always hated it, not only because it caused me no end of grief at school as I romped around in skinny jeans and Dr. Martens, but because Mum loved something I never understood. She loved turning perfectly normal women into frozen mannequins of themselves. They’d come out with PVC-shiny lips, dangerously flammable hair, and a petrified look. I’ve grown up a bit, though. At least I can bear to say the word “salon” now instead of just mumbling “Mum’s work.”

“Obviously not for clients, love. I told you already, it’s going to be the HQ for the Find Grace campaign. We’re going to get search parties together—we can’t rely on the police to do everything. It’s time for us to pull together, to help, and there’s the vigil to organize. It’s what Meg would’ve wanted.” For the first time since I found Meg, Mum seems more like her old self; she seems better now she has a plan. Ever since Dad left to start a new hippie life living off grid with his girlfriend in Scotland fifteen years ago, Mum’s always needed to keep moving, to keep busy, as though she’s constantly trying to outpace any feelings she doesn’t want to settle for too long. I don’t say what I’m thinking, that Simon—if he has Grace—could have her locked up hundreds of miles away from here. But I know if there’s a chance, no matter how minuscule, that Grace is just down the road, Mum won’t rest until the whole area is searched. It’s the doing something that’s important for her—and for the community—now.

“Sounds like Martin and Sylvia’s idea,” I say instead. Martin and his wife, Sylvia, live opposite us. Martin heads up the local community watch group. Most weekends they can be found in their fold-up chairs by the side of the road, trying to catch speeding drivers.

“Actually, it was my idea,” Mum calls from her room, “and Zara was the first to agree with me.” Mum employed Zara, a hairdresser, five years ago and the two of them had been firm friends ever since. Zara has a penchant for huge earrings and, like Mum, bad men. Things haven’t been easy between them recently. I’d come home one night in March and found Mum crying and halfway through a bottle of white. A customer claimed Zara had stolen her diamond engagement ring she’d had in her handbag during a haircut. She’d shown it to Zara to get her advice on how to have the stones reset, but when she got to the jeweler’s the ring wasn’t in her bag. Mum threatened to fire Zara, but then realized the salon would sink without her. A thin truce was declared and when I asked Mum if the ring was ever found she turned away from me, muttering something about water under the bridge. Mum comes out of her bedroom wearing jeans and a white T-shirt with Grace’s smiling face on the front. She hands me a folded, identical T-shirt.