The glass dining table was set with bright blue plates and crisp napkins. There was fragrant chicken with salad and a creamy herb dressing, chilled white wine... Serena relaxed again. She had another two weeks in California with Polly. Ella was handling the business with the help of a temp and sent her cheerful updates on how well it was all going without her. Tomorrow she and Polly were taking a trip to Gaviota State Park and she’d also penciled in a visit to some of the wineries and, most exciting of all, a day trip to Hearst Castle. Even though history was her job, she never ever got tired of it.

Her phone rang. She ignored it as she took another forkful of salad.

“It’s your mother,” Polly said helpfully, reading the screen upside down.

Serena felt two sensations hot on the heels of each other: irritation and a whisper of dread. Both were instinctive and both were unfair. She knew it wasn’t her mother’s fault that she found her needy and felt the pressure of being an only child.

The only remaining child.

“I’ll call her back later,” she said.

“It’s the early hours in the UK,” Polly said. “Maybe there’s some sort of emergency?”

The chicken seemed to turn to ashes in Serena’s mouth. She stared at Polly for what seemed like forever as the phone buzzed on and on. She refused to frame the thoughts that were hovering at the edge of her mind. Then the phone stopped abruptly and the silence sounded very loud indeed.

“Serena—” Polly said, but then her own phone started to ring with the same brash insistence.

“Don’t answer it.” Serena’s sense of dread increased.

Polly looked exasperated and ignored her.

“Hello, Jackie. You’re up late tonight. Is everything all right? How’s Paul?” Polly always exaggerated her British accent when speaking to her sister-in-law. Serena was never sure whether it was deliberate or not. Her aunt and her mother did not get on particularly well, although they did a good enough job of pretending that they did for the sake of family unity.

“We have nothing in common,” Polly had said once when Serena had asked her about their relationship. “It’s not even that we dislike each other, there’s just nothing to build on.”

Serena thought that like everything else, the differences, the cracks in their relationship, hadn’t been so obvious before Caitlin had vanished. Or perhaps she had just missed them. She had been only seventeen when she lost her twin and as far as she remembered, pretty self-absorbed. She could see that Polly, the independent, childless career woman and her mother, the stay-at-home housewife who felt slightly defensive about it, might not have had that much in common.

There was a tide of words from the other end of the phone. Polly was frowning. “Wait,” she said sharply. “Slow down. I don’t understand...” Then more quietly: “Yes of course. She’s here.”

She passed the phone across the table to Serena who took it without a word. She already knew what it was that she was going to hear. Superstitiously she wondered whether it had been the mention of her sister’s name earlier that evening that had somehow invited Caitlin to invade her peace; invited her back into her life to banish the tenuous contentment she had found in the last couple of weeks.