She pressed “end” and cut off the sound of her mother’s crying. The warmth seemed to flow back into the apartment, bringing with it the sunshine and the faint sounds of the world outside, but everything was different now, out of reach. In her mind she was already on her way home, back to England and the horror that was waiting.

“Shit,” Polly said. “I’m so sorry, hon. How awful. Do you want to talk about it?”

Serena shook her head. “I’m sorry, Aunt Pol, I can’t. I don’t really know how I feel yet.” She clenched her hands. “I just want to get on and do something.”

“Of course.” Polly sighed. She squeezed Serena’s arm and stood up. “There’s a flight leaving LAX at eleven that has some space. If we hurry—”

“Great.” Serena jumped up, abandoning the chicken salad. She had lost her appetite completely. “I’ll get my stuff together.”

Polly wrapped her in a hug. “I wish I could come with you, hon. I want to support you.”

“You’ve got work,” Serena said. “You can’t just drop everything, I know that. I’ll be fine. Really.”

“You’ll be supporting everyone else,” Polly said, suddenly fierce. “Your mother’s in bits, and Paul never was very good in a crisis.”

Serena tightened the hug for a moment before letting Polly go. She gave her aunt a watery smile. “Dad does his best,” she said, knowing that Polly’s unsentimental assessment of her brother was right. “I’m sure he’ll be a big comfort to Mum, and I’m happy to talk to Granddad. Actually, I’d rather I did it than that they tried to tell him about Caitlin.” She rubbed her eyes. “I’ll ring you every day, okay? That would really help.”

The worry lightened a little in Polly’s eyes. “That would be great, hon.”

As she threw her holiday clothes haphazardly into her suitcase, Serena started to feel more grounded again. It was a relief to have something practical to concentrate on. She was always able to ward off the dark, Caitlin-shaped thoughts with action. In the aftermath of her sister vanishing, she had talked to everyone: to family, the police, counselors and psychologists, and tried so hard to recover the memories of that night that she had lost through cognitive amnesia. The psychiatrists she had seen had told her that her memory could return at any time or not at all. Dissociative amnesia was completely unpredictable, and in the event, no treatment had made any difference at all. No memories had come back to her, and she had ended up exhausted and emotionally battered by the endless effort at recall. Not only had it felt as though she had lost those hours, more importantly, it had felt as though she had completely failed her sister.

Her hands still full of T-shirts and shorts, she froze for a second, possessed by the agonizing thought that she had in some way betrayed the trust that Caitlin had placed in her. She had always been the stronger one.