She called Freya’s school next, praying someone would still be there and cursing herself for not trying earlier. A security guard made sympathetic noises to Steph’s garbled explanation, then managed to intercept an administrator just leaving for the night. After some pleading from Steph, she went back into the office and checked their register system, confirming that Freya had been in all her normal lessons. Steph thanked her far too profusely, but once she’d hung up she didn’t know whether or not to feel reassured. She stared at her prized Family Calendar & Organizer (which Freya loved to make fun of), as though something illuminating might’ve replaced what she knew was there: Freya driving lesson (lunch) and Paul gym. Freya had scrawled a doodle of a Mini Cooper underneath: another unsubtle hint about the car she coveted. Steph had started drawing them, too, in the corners of the banknotes she gave Freya for her driving lessons: her way of telling her daughter that maybe, if she was lucky, they’d buy her one for her eighteenth.

Perhaps her driving instructor could shed some light. Maybe Freya would’ve mentioned something to him about going somewhere after school. And Chris lived two floors below, in the basement flat. Steph remembered when he and his wife had moved in, just over a year ago, she’d welcomed them with some half-joking comments about how handy it would be having a driving instructor in the building when Freya started to learn. When Freya had turned seventeen, Steph and Paul had felt obliged to send business Chris’s way. And, actually, he’d built up a decent reputation by then, teaching several of the neighborhood kids to drive.

There had been some tension lately, though. Steph cringed as she thought about the last proper conversation she’d had with Chris. At the prospect of asking him now for his help, her old shyness threatened to sneak back in, the tendency toward social avoidance she’d spent years training herself out of. She gulped her wine, squared her shoulders. A touch of awkwardness was nothing if it might help her track down Freya.

Pulling on the nearest coat, which turned out to be Paul’s heavy wax jacket, she locked her flat and flew down the stairs. In the hallway she paused with Emma’s door on her right, and the exterior door straight ahead, hit by another pang of nerves. The limestone floor made the hall permanently chilly. Steph rested her foot on the slab that had been wobbly for years, soothed by its familiar tilt, then shook herself and left the house.