The message ends. There’s a click.

‘No, no, no,’ Maddy panics, playing the message over, before realising that in doing so, she accidentally deletes it. ‘Fuck!’

Hands shaking, she presses the callback button, hearing the ring tone drone on and on. She grabs a biro from the pot on the counter, but it doesn’t work. She yanks open the drawer and grabs a freezer-bag marker and turns over an envelope to write on the back. She does a callback again, making a note of the unfamiliar landline number, then rings directory enquiries. It takes a while to get through, but when she finally speaks to an operator, they tell her that the number belongs to a phone box in Brighton.

Brighton? What’s Jamie doing down in Brighton? She calls again, but the number rings and rings. She imagines the empty phone box, seagulls flying overhead, discarded chip packets blowing in the wind.

‘Fuck!’ she exclaims, smashing the phone back on its casing. She can’t bear it. She’s missed him. He’s not there.

Her mind races with questions as she scrambles to latch on to the fact that she finally has a location for their son. It’s like water in a desert.

Jamie left in February, just before the first lockdown, and she’s had all year to worry herself sick about where he’s gone and what he’s doing. Much as she’s tried to tell herself that he’s a grown-up and must make his own way, his absence sometimes feels all-consuming. Today, like every other day, Jamie was her first guilty thought upon waking.

With so much time to reflect, she can’t help feeling that she’s let him down. She should have backed him up, but Trent had insisted that they present a united front. And, at the time, she’d agreed. But that plan had backfired spectacularly and, in the row that had ensued, some horrible things had been said that no one can take back.

She’d reported Jamie as a missing person twenty-four hours after he’d stormed out, but she got the impression from the police that they had better things to deal with than a middle-class, middle-aged woman fretting over her adult son leaving after a row. She’d been frantic with worry, but it had been an agonising five days before Jamie had called to tell them that he wasn’t missing, but simply gone. She’d thought he might have mellowed, or been ready to forgive – or, even better, contrite and apologetic. But, if anything, he’d only become harder. In a steely voice, he’d informed her that he had no interest in being part of their family any longer. His words, etched for so long on her memory as justification for her letting him go, now make her feel ashamed and unworthy.

She thought Jamie had just been licking his wounds and that he’d come round and come home. How wrong she’d been. About that … about everything.

Mum. The word clangs like a gong in her head. What kind of terrible mother is she? He’s finally reached out … and she wasn’t there for him. Maybe he’s feeling sentimental. Jamie always loved Christmas when he was little. But then, as an only child, who could blame him? He was always spoilt rotten. She longs to tell him she’s bought a tin of Quality Street and is saving him the green triangles. She aches to remind him that they were once a loving family.