Something broke then. Some vital rubber band of discretion snapped and flew off. She told him everything: the video, the sheep, the Birdmen, the impossible fucking vista of the snow-swept moor and the thundering, feathery reptilian beasts. She saw him write her off as stark raving mad quite early on, but he’d been well brought up—and she was the goddamn Ancient Mariner and wouldn’t let him make his excuses and leave. She talked at him for twenty minutes straight, and out of force of habit he scribbled it all down in his notebook, although she’d bet it went in the station bin the moment he got back. After that, when Lee had finally vomited up all those words her lies had corralled within her, he actually gave her a smile, a top-of-the-range placate-the-madwoman model, and told her he’d be in touch. Thankfully he never was.

The search went on for two weeks. They found Mal’s pack by the three stones of the Six Brothers. They didn’t find her, of course. She’d gone in a direction not picked out on the compass rose, off all maps. Lee remembered Mal’s dad, pitching up hot and angry after driving for hours. She remembered the look of absolute loathing he’d turned on her because Lee had been found and his daughter had not. She remembered looking at her own reflection the same way for many, many mornings. Mal had been the centre of her life, the object of her desire, the light that made all the petty, grim darknesses of the world bearable. As the days went on and the search became an exercise in public relations, Lee remembered looking into the future and seeing…nothing. A life without Mal, something she’d never planned for. Stupid teenage lovelorn girl, but she had loved, and then she’d lost, and right then she didn’t think the former made the latter in any way better.

They never found Mal. That made it worse for her family, because to them she was lying out on the moors somewhere like a stray sheep, vanished impossibly into that little knee joint of wilderness at the southern tip of the British Isles. But Lee knew she was elsewhere—could even console herself with the thought It’s what she would have wanted. A bespoke fate for Elsinore Mallory, to which no other human being had ever been consigned.

As the years went by and Lee—by her own estimation—miraculously didn’t open her wrists in the bath or chug the contents of her parents’ medicine cabinet, she mythologized the disappearance. It made things easier. She was The Girl Who Stayed, Mal was The Girl Who Left, like they were immortalized in Doctor Who episodes. She used to dream of Mal as though she was still out there somehow, as though she’d come back.