As I reach the landing, I hear the buzz of a mobile phone on silent. Pausing, I listen for a moment trying to figure out where it is coming from. Laurel’s room. Quietly, so as not to disturb Fran, I push open the door to see a silver iPhone X lying on Laurel’s bed. Dominic’s phone. He must have been in here earlier. We all seem to have found our way into Laurel’s room at one point or another since she went missing, although I felt I didn’t really have the right to be there, sneaking in when Fran and Dominic were elsewhere, trying to soak up a little bit of Laurel’s aura, to find a little bit of comfort. There isn’t any though, not without her here.

The buzzing stops, and it’s almost eerily silent in here. I’m used to Laurel filling the room with chatter and laughter, not this dead, thick silence. I stoop to pick up some Lego bricks that lie tumbled in a corner, left in a half-constructed version of a square house that Laurel was building on Saturday afternoon. Pausing, my hand hovering over the jumble of bright plastic, I don’t know whether to pack them away or not, before deciding that Lego will be the last thing on Laurel’s mind when – if – she comes home, and I throw them gently into the plastic tub they live in.

Turning my attention to the pile of clean laundry that sits on the rocking chair, still waiting to be put away from that fateful Saturday two weeks ago, I open drawers and start to pack away her clothes, pausing at her favourite sweatshirt. I lift it surreptitiously to my nose, hoping to inhale some small fragment of her scent, but all I can smell is soap powder and fabric softener, tears thickening at the back of my throat. There is nothing left of Laurel in her clothes, it has all been washed away.

The buzzing of the iPhone starts up again, making me jump. I shove the sweatshirt into the drawer and hurry across the bedroom to answer it before Fran hears it. The screen shows a number not stored in Dominic’s phone, so I pick it up and answer it, thinking that maybe it’s something to do with a patient, an emergency perhaps.

‘Hello?’

‘Dominic?’ The voice on the other end of the line is breathy and low, but unmistakably female. ‘Is that you?’

‘No. Dominic isn’t here at the moment. Can I take a message for him?’ I ask, my mind already starting to work over time.

‘Ah . . . no. Thank you.’ The phone beeps three times in my ear and the line goes dead.