He picked up a photograph of her from the sideboard, taken when she was fifteen. She was wearing a pullover, jeans and wellingtons, and sticking her tongue out at him, the photographer. She was standing, with ill-disguised boredom, on some hillside in Derbyshire during one of the many weekends away that he and Mel had tried to use to bond her back into the family. Her blonde, naturally wavy hair and her precocious curves made her look much more grown-up than the little girl he had always so adored. Evidence of her love for him, such as it was, took almost archaeological skills to unearth. One time when he had found her unexpectedly in the kitchen for breakfast with a female friend, he had ruffled her hair and said that he loved her. She had ducked away, responding with an angry: ‘Fuck off!’ Once her friend had gone, he had then had to endure a lecture about how he was ‘destroying her credibility’. So much for parental love. Vanessa’s disrespectful and dismissive tone towards both him and Mel was so ingrained and so pervasive that she barely looked up from her phone when dishing out a wounding comment. Her favourite way of noticing him was: ‘Hey John, you really are short.’ Always John, not dad, since she was fourteen. And it was true, she had half an inch on him even in bare feet. His biggest mistake, a year ago and never repeated, had been to remind her that five foot seven was not actually short for a man, merely the low end of average. Her uncontrollable laughter, which actually required her to hold onto him for stability, had cut him to the quick.

Yet, very occasionally, Perry had noticed hints of daughterly affection: a warm glance, an affectionate dig in the ribs while he was shaving with a wet razor, an attempt to trip him up as they passed in the hallway, even an arm briefly draped around his neck while she was texting somebody else. Was this all the validation a parent was expected to subsist upon? In exchange for the worry, the expense and the endless time of bringing her up? He sometimes felt like an astrophysicist, examining the faintest pulse of radio waves from a far-distant galaxy for signs of meaning, for traces of significance, hoping for evidence of love.

Mel’s last message to him seemed to indicate that Vanessa had been home on Tuesday, because of the great pile of dirty clothes dumped in the laundry basket on that day, and the disappearance of all the fresh vegetables from the fridge. The physicist again: Vanessa was dark matter, and invisible. Her existence could only be deduced by the gravitational disturbance of objects around her as she swung past on an undetectable orbit. Finding her would not be easy, but if she was still missing by tomorrow night, he would report her missing. That would bring the sky down, all round.