Her gaze shifted to take in Paul’s parents waiting on the pavement. Heather’s lips moved incessantly; Brian spun his watch around and around his wrist. Steph felt a blast of love, as she always did when she saw them, especially because she had no living parents of her own. But today she wasn’t sure she could cope with their emotions as well as hers.

She took a breath and went to let them in. The hallway smelled of bleach where the egg had now been cleaned away. Steph’s stomach flipped at the memory of it slithering from the book. She thought again of their egged doorstep a fortnight ago, before she’d had any reason to pay it much notice, before the line between meaningless and sinister had become blurred. Other things had started to niggle at her, too, like those three rotten banana skins impaled on their railings about three weeks before. Was it a pattern, or were these just things that happened all the time?

As soon as she opened the exterior door, Heather was upon her. She wrapped her solid arms around Steph in such a heartfelt way that she felt something break inside. Please don’t be nice to me, don’t be too motherly. Brian hovered behind, always more restrained. Like Paul, he was an ex-policeman, and often struck Steph as an older, less complex version of his son. But perhaps she was being unfair with the latter part of that judgment. He kissed Steph’s cheek and clasped her hands with such gravity that again Steph almost crumbled.

A confused thought flashed through her mind: Frey will be disappointed to have missed them. She regressed in age when her grandparents visited, let them ply her with ginger cake and call her by pet names she’d long outgrown.

“Oh, Steph,” Heather kept saying, tears slipping out of her eyes as if she was no longer aware of them.

Upstairs, her in-laws gazed bemusedly around them. The flat did feel alien without Freya in it, even though her leggings were still on the radiator and her Ugg boots were in a heap next to the sofa where Steph had repeatedly asked her not to leave them.

“Where’s Paul?” Brian asked.

“He’s gone out.”

Heather looked at her. “Where?”

“I’m . . . not sure.”

“Oh . . .” Heather blinked behind her owlish glasses. Steph had never seen her look so lost. She was an ex–social worker, gutsy and levelheaded. She sat down and immediately stood up again, the wire frames sliding along her nose. “What have the police said? What are they doing to find our Freya?”