At lunchtime she walks to Central Park to eat her sandwiches. On a bench not too far from her own sits a homeless man watching the birds hop across the grass. Twenty-five years ago, Ferry Meadows might not have been surrounded by houses, but it could have been home to vagrants. She wonders if police interviewed any of them, or would they have gone as unnoticed then as they do now, slipping through the cracks of a society they don’t choose or appear to fit into? She gets up and crosses the grass to him, offering the cheese and mayonnaise sandwich that Maureen had left out for her beside Patrick’s. He takes it in both hands and thanks her. Chloe notices as he does the dirt that has accumulated under his fingernails, his messy beard and weather-beaten skin. She understands how he would prefer to drift from place to place. Not everyone needs to cast an anchor into one house, one home, one family.

She returns to the library and spends a couple more hours scanning through articles, but when she fails to fill her notebook with anything new, she knows it’s time to go home. Only then she remembers the last thing she wanted to check. She flicks back a few pages in her book and types the name of the drugs she’d found in the bathroom cabinet into the search bar. She checks sertraline first and the results spring up. She clicks on the one at the top:

. . . often used to treat depression, and sometimes panic attacks, obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) . . .

She checks the next one. The same comes up:

. . . depression, obsessive compulsive disorder, anxiety . . .

She double-checks diazepam and, as she suspected, among the answers is that it helps those with difficulty sleeping. Chloe can’t imagine Maureen has slept easily these last twenty-five years.

She notes everything down, then packs her notebook away in her bag and heads back towards the bus station. She will arrive home early, but luckily she’s already told Maureen her boss is away, so it won’t raise too many eyebrows.

On the bus home she sends Hollie a message telling her she has an interview, knowing that it will please her to read that. Then she sinks back against the window and waits for the big sky of the Fens to open up as they leave the city.

Patrick beats her home from work; he and Maureen are working in the back garden when she walks down the drive.

‘Hello, Chloe, love,’ Maureen calls to her. ‘Good day at work?’

Chloe gives her a generic response that seems to satisfy her, and Maureen turns back to supervising Patrick as he turns over earth and she bends to pick up the weeds he’s churned up.