In the dark of early morning, Diana woke to find Constance not beside her. There was no light under the bathroom door. Diana snapped on her bedside light. The clothes she had laid out for Constance and her memory board were still on the chair. Perhaps she had gone downstairs to get something to drink or eat. Diana could not move quickly, cursed her bones as she struggled out of bed and found her robe, cursed the shoes that had turned her feet into sirens of pain as she made her slow way down the stairs. No light had been turned on. At the touch of each switch, a new room bloomed into emptiness. The back door stood open, the kitchen stone cold. Diana turned on the outside light, but it illuminated nothing more than the back porch and steps leading down into the garden. Surely Constance wouldn’t try to garden in the dark? Diana could see the car in the garage. Might Constance be in it? How long had she been gone?

Diana laboured back through the house and dressed as quickly as she was able hearing her own sobbing grunts as if they came from somewhere outside herself, for she had closed her mind down to anxiety. She would drive around the neighbourhood for no more than twenty minutes. Then, if she hadn’t found Constance, she would phone the police. After the police, the hospitals. In a confused state, Constance wouldn’t know where she lived. Had she taken her handbag with her? Diana checked as she went through the kitchen. It was there on the counter where she always left it. No identification, and, if it wasn’t Diana who found her, she would probably resist.

Why hadn’t Diana gone ahead and put inside locks on all the doors? She hadn’t wanted the house to seem a prison to Constance, and she’d never simply wandered off like this, except once or twice in a store before Diana stopped taking her shopping. Constance had been like an animal knowing the limits of her territory, and Diana had put her trust in that, stupidly.

There was no point in trying to outguess Constance. Whatever motive had taken her out of the house would have been forgotten at the first corner. She might invent another, but that would not last more than a block or two. Diana’s only hope was that confusion might have stopped Constance before she had gone too far.