I call out my number and she keys it into her phone.

‘Grand, I’ll get that to you now.’

‘Thank you. I’d better head in to check on Emily and Ben. Actually, we’re having a small housewarming on Friday evening. Come along if you’re free? Around seven?’

A small hesitation. Then a half-smile. ‘Lovely. I’ll be there.’

‘Great! It was nice to meet you.’

‘You too,’ Fran says, turning back to her gardening.

As a general rule, I wait until the weekend to open wine, but when the sun is out that rule gets shapeshifty. You never know how long the heatwave will last. What if it rains for the month of July, and there are no more wine-in-the-garden nights? That’s how I explain it to Mark when I open the bottle of rosé that Wednesday evening, balancing glasses on our slightly rickety garden table. I don’t really need to explain it to him, he doesn’t overthink the way I do, and he’s happy to take the proffered drink without a dissertation on the rights and wrongs.

‘So, I met one of our neighbours tonight and discovered something about this house.’

‘Oh?’ He takes a sip of wine and reaches instinctively for his phone before remembering not to.

‘Do you know the name Lily Murphy?’

‘Yeah …?’

‘It’s their house. The Murphys lived here.’

‘What?’

‘Yes. You didn’t know? Even though you used to live in Rowanbrook?’

‘Well sure, but we lived three rows over. And we moved across to Oakbrook a bit before it happened, I think. God. Are you certain?’

‘Yep. The solicitor sent us details of all previous owners, but I hadn’t bothered to read it. I went back and checked after talking to Fran, the neighbour. The names are there in black and white. Mary and Robbie Murphy. You really didn’t know?’

‘No! I’d have said.’

‘You’d heard of Lily Murphy though, right?’

‘Yeah, of course … though it’s hard to remember now which bits I heard in real life and which bits I know from newspapers.’

‘But you’ve never mentioned it, in all our years together?’ I ignore the little voice saying I’m in no place to criticize.

‘I suppose it just never came up.’ He looks across the garden at the back of our new home. ‘It’s a bit weird though, knowing they lived here.’

‘Weird and sad. Three years old, never seen again. Same age as Sophie.’

I pick up my phone and type ‘Lily Murphy Missing Child’ into Google. The first search result is from Wikipedia and the second is a thirty-year-anniversary newspaper feature. Both are accompanied by thumbnail images and I zoom in now on the first photo. Little blonde curls, big blue eyes, snub nose, dimpled cheeks, startled smile.

Familiar smile.

Something lurches inside me. I blink and my mouth is suddenly dry.

‘God, yeah,’ Mark is saying. ‘Same age as Sophie. When you put it like that …’ He picks up his empty wine glass, stands and stretches. ‘I can’t believe they never found out what happened to her.’