It was delicious. All the better for the walk there and the cheapness and the walk home in the fresh air and the making of it themselves. In the end they ate half of it straight out of the flan dish. Maybe they needed to grease the flan dish a bit next time, but they could always take the dish and the quiche to the beach. They put it in the fridge once all of them had had enough.

Dell stood in front of the fridge. She wished Heidi was there. There was plenty of time for more laughs, but Heidi wasn’t there.

‘Maybe she’ll come home soon,’ Greta said, and she and Peggy put their arms round Dell’s shoulder.

‘Maybe,’ Dell said. ‘No one’s seen her for months.’

‘Someone’s seen her,’ they said. Then, ‘There was that phone call.’ And everyone nodded a bit.

‘It’s late,’ Dell said, shutting the fridge door.

They started getting ready for bed. They all ended up in the hallway at the same time, standing at the doors of their rooms. It was late and they were tired and everything seemed off-kilter without Heidi. ‘Night,’ they said to each other, and Peggy and Greta went to bed and tried not to think about Dell by herself in the half-filled room.

*

The quiche might have tasted even better the next day, and it was decided. On Friday night they repeated the trip to the supermarket, but this time they didn’t need some of the stuff because there was still enough left over from the first quiche. They worked together in a similar way, except now they had a bowl that Greta and Peggy had bought from the shop. They hadn’t been able to find a cheese grater but when Greta opened the cupboard to get a cup to measure with, there was a cheese grater on the shelf next to it.

‘Where did this come from?’ Greta said.

Everyone shrugged.

With the proper bowl they were able to mix everything in one lot. The mystery grater made the cheese a much better shape and nothing fell over the sides of the bigger bowl. They were worried about these changes. Was there some special magic spell to the way they did it last time? But when it came out it looked really good – maybe better, and they resisted it and put it in the fridge and went to sleep. Greta and Peggy had bus timetables from the library and they had worked out a bus and which bus stop they needed to be at before ten-thirty the next morning. There were hardly any buses on Saturdays, but, realistically, if they missed the bus, they decided, they could take the quiche to the park in town and eat it under a tree by themselves.