Freya’s old one-eyed teddy was number eight. Her multicolored psychology revision notes—left halfway through a sentence—were number twelve. A half-full bottle of her favorite Lacoste perfume was seventeen.

The police had re-examined her attic room, leaving small numbered labels on everything, even the towels in her en suite. Now that she was allowed to touch things again, Steph inhaled the perfume, pressed her face into the teddy, thumbed through the train tickets on the white-painted desk. Maybe there would be something nobody had yet spotted, something whose significance only she would recognize. Or maybe just by touching these things she could pull Freya back into reach.

She wished she could lay out her thoughts around the room and number them, too, to have any chance of making sense of them. Paul wasn’t back, wasn’t answering her messages. Even when he was here his mind was blatantly elsewhere, his face frighteningly shuttered. In his absence, the police had come to look at the smashed egg and had seized How to Be a Better Parent for testing. But not before Steph had caught glimpses of its advice.

Be open and honest with your child.

Give them explicit permission to lay the worst at your door; let them know that nothing they might want to talk about is off-limits.

Don’t avoid topics just because they’re difficult.

Every word had felt like a wagging finger. But we used to talk, Steph had wanted to whisper back to the pages. She used to tell me things.

She’d seen nothing that said parents had to be limitlessly honest with their children in return. Or with each other. But her brain had penciled it between the lines.

A visit from Jess, just after the police, had only heightened her guilt. Jess had swung from insisting she would’ve known if Freya had been upset or in danger to bursting into tears and suggesting that Freya had been different lately. She’d thrown around words like moody, distracted, hyper, secretive without seeming to realize they were making Steph’s head spin, her heart hurt.

Now Steph rippled her fingers over the spines of Freya’s books. Freya was known for her sportiness, but there was a bookish side to her, which Steph treasured. She’d given her the Ursula K. Le Guin novels she’d adored when she was a teenager, and hoped her daughter would be captivated by them too—hoped so much, in fact, that she hadn’t yet asked her about them, just in case she wasn’t. The shelves were mainly devoted to Agatha Christie and Sherlock Holmes: Freya had long had a thing for detective fiction. But it was a dog-eared Harry Potter that currently lay next to her bed, bringing a lump to Steph’s throat. She knew Freya reread Potter whenever she needed comfort, and used the soothing murmur of the audiobooks to lull herself to sleep.