Di pushed the enormous bird his way, then seemed to notice his plate was still half full of meat and gravy-drowned mashed potato.

“Not hungry?” she asked, and her eyes narrowed—or did they? All afternoon he’d been looking for signs that Vicky’s sisters were treating him abnormally, but he could wring meaning out of anything when he was feeling paranoid—a glance exchanged between Jane and Di, a casual question about what he’d been up to.

The first part of the meal had brimmed with discussion about Freya. Chris should have anticipated that she’d be the talking point of this week’s lunch, should have come mentally prepared. Instead he’d been dumbstruck as Di’s iPad had been passed round the table, the local news story on its screen, Freya’s photo beneath a smear of fingerprints.

“It’s awful,” Di had kept saying, her face stretched into a mournful expression, “just awful.” Chris had bristled with anger. She didn’t even know Freya. Why was she acting so upset? Whereas Jane, the younger sister, could barely hide her excitement at the fact that the missing girl was her sister’s neighbor, her brother-in-law’s student.

He’d been relieved when the others had picked up their cutlery and the iPad had been set aside. But now the spotlight was shining on his lack of appetite.

“Dieting?” Jane asked.

Chris’s hand reflexed to his middle and he was dismayed, as ever, by the soft paunch that seemed to have developed almost overnight when he’d hit his late thirties. Along with the thinning patch on his crown, which he would wince at in unflattering photos or mirrors at the wrong angle. That was why he shaved his hair short these days. Was it also why Vicky didn’t seem to find him remotely attractive anymore?

“I had a big helping,” he lied.

“Belly bigger than your eyes,” Di’s six-year-old daughter, Polly, diagnosed.

“Other way round, Pol,” Di said. “Eyes bigger than your belly.”

“Nobody’s eyes are bigger than their belly. Not even Anna’s and Elsa’s and they’ve got huge eyes . . .” Polly demonstrated by widening hers, fluttering her fingers on top of them like lashes.

“Anna and Elsa?” Chris said distractedly.

“From Frozen!” everybody else at the table replied, looking at him like he was an alien.