“I’m supposed to just sit here?” Steph moved toward him.

“One of us should.”

“Tell me where you’re going, Paul. Running away again. What the fuck’s going on in your head?”

The word stalled him. She rarely swore these days. They’d both tried to kick the habit when Freya was little because she’d been such a sponge, with a cheeky intuition for the naughty words. Paul had the urge to swear now, too, as ferociously as he could.

He put his hands on Steph’s shoulders, molding his fingers around their familiar shape. You could tell her. As the thought crossed his mind it was chased by dread. Steph seemed to change beneath his hands, her shoulders becoming thinner, her hair darker, those cheekbones warping into somebody else’s. A different suffering mother desperate for answers. Paul reared away with an intake of breath.

“I’m sorry.” His hands tremored in midair. “I don’t even know what’s in my head myself. I just need to get out, need to be doing something.”

She opened her mouth but any response seemed to evaporate. Paul walked quickly to the door, guilt tearing at his stomach.

“Paul,” he heard her say, but he thundered down the stairs.

Outside, every tree had his daughter’s smile. Some of the neighbors had displayed the poster in their windows—Steph must’ve asked them to—and it was as if they’d imprisoned Freya in their tasteful living rooms. One poster had blown free from wherever it had been nailed and was pirouetting with new freedom down the road.

Paul battled an urge to chase it, dive on it. He yanked his eyes away as a taxi pulled up on the street and Chris Watson climbed out. Paul’s jaw hardened. In the storm of everything else he’d almost forgotten about Watson, the last person to see Freya. Had he received his grilling from the police? The guy looked ruffled, yet somehow not ruffled enough. He walked to his door without acknowledging the posters of Freya, without seeming to notice her dad watching him all the way.

Paul thought about Steph’s disagreement with Chris. How he’d seemed unwilling to enter Freya for her test even though she’d taken to driving as instinctively as she’d mastered catching and kicking a ball. How the school had fucked up the register and the CCTV had proven useless and there was a great blank space in the middle of Freya’s afternoon.

He was so close to stalking Watson to his door: What do you know about my daughter? But still one thought roared louder than the rest, dragging his attention onward.

Two missing girls, then and now.

—