One corner of her mouth turned up. Slowly she lowered her hands. “Haven’t you heard?” she said.

“Heard?”

“About Freya. Nobody’s seen her since yesterday.”

Freya’s image flooded Chris’s mind. Her confident posture when she drove. The healthy glow of her skin, which always made him feel flabby and light-deprived. He saw her vividly for a moment, eclipsing Jess as she sat six inches taller, shoulders relaxed, blonde ponytail fanned over the headrest. Infuriatingly confident, sometimes. Like she thought driving was no big deal.

“She hasn’t turned up?” he said. “I saw her mum last night . . .” He recalled Steph at his door, hunched inside an oversized man’s jacket that had made her look somehow diminished. A different woman from the one who’d had the gall to challenge him in the street about her daughter’s lessons.

“It’s not like Frey to go off without saying anything,” Jess said. “She’s so on it with her training. Even with her schoolwork, though she doesn’t admit it. She gets better grades than me every time, you know. We’ve got business coursework due Monday . . .”

Seeing she was getting teary again, Chris patted her arm. She stiffened and he wished he’d stuck with his earlier decision not to touch her. It was hard to know what to do with a crying seventeen-year-old girl. Impossible to console her without overstepping the mark. Next month he’d be turning forty, yet in some ways he felt the same as he had at Jess’s age. It was only the things and the people around him that had altered. Circumstances. Life.

“Her parents keep calling me.” Jess sniffed. “But I really don’t know where she could be.”

“Does she tell you everything?” Chris asked, then wondered if it was a weird question. He was suddenly conscious of the intimacy of being in a stationary car together, the usual conventions of a driving lesson stripped away. He stabbed at the button to roll down his window, air rushing into the car with the clamor of the street, a smell of petrol.

“I thought so. Maybe not so much lately. She’s seemed a bit . . .” Jess made a mysterious, looping hand gesture, then turned to him. “Did she say anything to you?”

“Me? Like what?”

She blinked, her eyes almost opaque with held-back tears. “I don’t know. Like, anything.”

“No, I . . . She seemed . . . normal.”