I ring Iris’s phone. The message is different this time.

The number you are calling cannot be reached at this time.

Please try again later.

Does that mean Iris has turned off her phone? Or maybe she ran out of battery? Or she could be out of coverage?

The doorman emerges from the hotel smiling. There is a room for us. I nearly weep with relief even though this looks like the kind of hotel that could clear my running away from home account in one night.

“Do you have any luggage?” the doorman asks. I open the boot. He lifts out Dad’s small case, hands it to a porter.

“May I have your car keys?” the doorman asks me.

“Why?”

“Our valet will park your vehicle, madam.”

“Oh. Right,” I say, handing him the keys.

I don’t even ask how much. I just book in. “One night?” the receptionist asks, her immaculate polished fingernail hovering over the return button on her keyboard.

One night? I don’t know. I don’t know anything. I nod, and her fingernail glances against the key and she hands me a card and tells me we are on the top floor.

Luxury is so quiet. Everything slides and clicks and fits. Luxury has a particular taste and smell and feel. Like the towels for example. Kitten soft and enormous. They smell like lavender. The fruit in the bowl is tree-fresh. The chocolates are handmade, and the view of the lake is magnificent through a squeaky-clean window, unblemished by streaks.

Even the weather forecast—printed on ivory parchment with traces of leaves embedded in the margin and placed on a piece of jade sea glass on the bed—is luxurious, in spite of its prediction of rain.

So far, I have made tea, peeled a banana for Dad, put him to bed for a nap, and phoned twenty-seven hotels.

None of them have a reservation for an Iris Armstrong. Or a Vera Armstrong.

Or a Terry Armstrong. Or an Iris Shepherd. Or a Vera Keogh.

I tried a few different variations. Some of the receptionists aren’t as patient as others.

My ear is hot and red from pressing the phone against it.

I can’t even go to the clinic and wait for Iris there. I don’t have an address. When I Google it, it just gives a PO box number.

If Iris were here, if she were helping me search, she’d say, Think like a suicidal person.

But I can’t do that.

Even now, I can’t think of Iris as a suicidal person. She just isn’t the type. Is there a type?

Our family doctor killed himself, oh years ago now. Hanged himself from a tree. A young woman, walking her dog, found him, swinging from the end of the rope he had bought in Woodie’s that morning.

I was angry with him for a long time afterwards. He had a clever, beautiful wife, also a doctor. He had a mother. I remember those two women at the funeral, their faces collapsed with grief. And the young woman who found him. She was there too, her face stiff with shock. I imagined when she closed her eyes at night, she saw him, swinging from the end of the rope, like hopelessness.