‘Have you seen my watch?’ Robbie asked that evening, as they got ready for their dinner guests’ imminent arrival. ‘I couldn’t find it this morning.’

‘I haven’t seen it … were you wearing it when we were out last night?’

‘No, I’d left it on the dresser but when I looked this morning it wasn’t there,’ he said, buttoning his shirt. ‘I thought it’d show up during the day, but it hasn’t. Strange.’

He walked out to the bathroom and Mary stood in the middle of the bedroom. Thinking. Scanning. She moved to the dresser. Her perfume bottles stood where they always stood, and her powder puff rested on her compact, exactly where she’d left it last night. Her lipstick, usually upright, lay flat. She reached to pick it up, and on instinct, removed the lid. Inside was half a lipstick. Someone had broken it. Someone had broken it after she used it at seven o’clock yesterday evening. She looked around the room, at the floor beneath the dresser, under the bed, beside the door. But it was nowhere. Who might have broken it? Lily? Fran and Zara? And where was Robbie’s watch?

She shook her head.

The lipstick was old. The watch would show up. She sat on the bed and took a steadying breath. Everything would be OK.

31

June 2018

NOW THAT I’M IN Blackrock Park, I’m uneasy. What if Deep Dive is some kind of fraudster or psychopath? I pull my blazer tighter and glance around. Maybe I shouldn’t have come on my own. But who else could I have brought? Mark thinks I’m walking the pier with Adana, and Adana’s on her own with the kids this weekend. Beyond those two, there is no one.

I’m sitting on a bench near the pond, just as Deep Dive instructed. He’ll find me, apparently.

The sky is grey for the first time in weeks and the park is unusually quiet for a Sunday morning. A little way away, a child of about three is throwing bread for the ducks. A small, blonde child who reminds me of Sophie but then just as quickly, of Lila. Of Lily.

I turn my head to scan the handful of people walking through the park. A woman in her thirties, pushing a pram. An elderly lady with a tiny dog. Two teenage girls in shorts, both on phones. A man in a baseball cap and dark glasses. My eyes stay on him. He’s walking faster than the people around him and seems to be coming in my direction. I sit forward on the bench, torn between fleeing and staying put, and I’m so fixated on him, I don’t notice at first that someone is sitting beside me.

‘Joanna?’ says a woman’s voice.

‘Yes?’

‘It’s me. I’m me,’ says the woman, and gives a small laugh. ‘Obviously I’m me,’ she adds, ‘but I mean I write the blog.’

The man in the dark glasses passes by and, still confused, I shake the woman’s hand. Deep Dive is not what I was expecting. A couple of years older than me, petite and pale, with black-rimmed glasses and blonde hair. She’s wearing a simple white shirt with light grey jeans, flat sandals and no make-up. With tiny pearls in her ears, and a burgundy scarf around her neck, she looks wholly unremarkable and her first impression is somehow insipid, completely at odds with the authoritative voice behind Deep Dive.