After her Skype call with Zeb, Emma wandered around her flat with an unsettled cloud in her stomach, eventually ending up back in her son’s empty room. She lay on his bed, looking at the framed Deadpool poster on the wall, trying to unpack everything he’d said to her.

Why couldn’t she stop thinking how strange Zeb and Freya’s encounter in the park seemed? Or fight the feeling that there was more to it than Zeb had revealed? Even though he’d been so angry with her for looking through his drawings—among all the other things he was angry about—she got up and retrieved his sketchbook from the drawer. She studied the picture of Freya until the girl seemed to come to life on the page, crying and confiding as to why she was upset.

It was this “why” that Emma now had to pass on to Freya’s parents, despite its sensitivity, despite the many questions it would spark. So do it, she chided herself. Stop procrastinating.

She closed the sketchbook and then guiltily, without quite knowing why, opened Zeb’s other drawer to peek inside. With a twinge of sorrow she noted its bareness: just a few folded T-shirts, a Sherlock Holmes book (since when was Zeb a fan?), and his keys to this house, which he’d obviously decided he didn’t need. She moved on to his wardrobe, in denial about the fact that she was now actively snooping, and half smiled at the skateboard propped up in a corner, a summer-long fad from a few years ago. In his bedside cabinet, the box of artists’ charcoal she’d bought him last Christmas also made her pause. Emma touched the slim pencils, the thicker charcoal sticks, the solid blocks. Then she noticed something down the side of the box: a long, glossy rectangle of white.

As she plucked it out and turned it over, she already knew what it would be. Zeb and Freya grinned up at her from a strip of photos just like the one Steph had brought round that morning. Four times over, laughing with heads together. In one picture Freya was tipping a vodka bottle into her mouth, looking more like a hard-core socialite than a blossoming sports star.

So Zeb had a memento of their meeting too.

Emma tried to convince herself it wasn’t hidden. It was just in his bedside cabinet. There was nothing wrong with that. Her pulse was rapid as she put it back and left the room.

—

Her nerves only grew as she rapped on the Harlows’ door. She’d rarely ventured up these stairs in the past and she wished now that she’d done so more often, for pleasant neighborly reasons. Maybe then this wouldn’t feel so daunting. Their door was painted a smart, clean ivory.