‘What did she do with that form, then?’ Ezra asked. ‘The one she’d partially filled in? If we can find it, we can use the parts she did fill in to work out how to fill in the rest.’

Edie passed him a glass. ‘That’s not a bad idea.’

He grinned. ‘I’m full of them, you know.’

Edie shook her head and took a mouthful of wine. ‘You, Ezra Jones,’ she said, ‘are nowhere near as clever as you think you are.’

He put down his wine glass and pulled her toward him. ‘Clever enough to know what’s good for me,’ he said, bending down to kiss her, which turned into another, and then another.

A little later, Ezra said, ‘We really should find those forms before she comes back.’

‘They’ll be long gone by now. Ripped up and thrown out, I should think.’

Ezra shrugged. ‘We can at least try the bin in her room, can’t we?’

Edie picked up her glass. ‘I can’t go poking through her things, Ezra. That would be a terrible thing to do.’

‘Then don’t,’ he said. ‘All you need to do is walk in there, pick up the bin, and walk out again. You can say you wanted to empty it before rubbish day. That won’t be a lie either, will it,’ he pointed out, ‘as that’s tomorrow.’

Edie hesitated, but only for a moment. After all, she did need to empty the bins.

‘Wait here,’ she ordered Ezra. She went quickly upstairs and retrieved the small waste-paper basket from beneath Gilly’s neatly kept desk.

‘It might not even be in there,’ she said, arriving back in the kitchen and holding the basket out to Ezra.

A second later, Ezra picked a crumpled ball of paper out of the detritus. ‘But it is.’

Edie grabbed the bin. ‘Fine. I’ll put this back.’

By the time she returned to the kitchen, Ezra was frowning over the forms, which he’d smoothed out and laid on the worktop.

‘I don’t understand this at all,’ he said. ‘It’s ready to go. She’s filled it in.’

Ezra was right. Every single space asking for information had been filled in with Gilly’s small, studiously neat handwriting. Edie picked up each sheet in turn, wondering if she was missing something, but there were no crossings out, no mistakes, nothing to indicate why the application had been discarded. Edie read through the personal statement, which was a perfectly legible and cogently put argument that would surely have convinced any assessor of Gilly’s right to a place in higher education.

‘All she had to do was sign it,’ Edie said, utterly mystified.

Ezra shook his head, equally at a loss. ‘I thought she must have been having some issue with filling in the form,’ he said. ‘But that obviously wasn’t the problem.’

‘Well, what then?’ Edie asked, frustrated. She picked up the final sheet and glared at the blank signature box, as if that one element of absence might reveal all. ‘Why the hell didn’t the girl sign the damn thing?’