Stella had run away from home for the first time on a day like this. There’d been precisely the same wind-raked, emptied-out kind of sky, and there’d been birds—starlings rather than gulls—wheeling over the rooftops. When the police had finished talking to me I’d gone up to my bedroom and shivered in the semidarkness, and whenever my eye had fallen on the ordinary things around my room—the candlewick bedspread, the teddies, the crumpled heap of school uniform on the floor—I felt she’d be fine, but whenever I looked out at that sky I felt sure they’d find her dead. I was eleven. She turned up again the next morning and said sorry for scaring us, and we got over it, and life went back to nearly normal.

“Are you all right?”

Cory’s voice made me jump, and I tensed when he placed his hands on my arms. He massaged my rigid shoulders, and I wanted to respond by loosening up but I couldn’t will myself to do it. All the little locks that ought to have clicked under his touch were jammed.

“What are you doing up here?” he said.

I closed my eyes so I didn’t have to look at my own frowning face in the window. Various answers tempted me. I was about to phone my friend Tom for a heart-to-heart. I was about to rip all the pages out of the notebook you gave me. I was packing my bags.

Gently, his fingers came to rest on my neck.

“There’s something I want you to have,” he said. “Can I show you now? And then let’s finish eating and I’d better get back to work.”

My mind was still on Tom and I shook my head without thinking. Cory kissed the back of my neck and said my name.

“Here, Freya, look.”

He fumbled in his pocket and various bits fell out—a pencil end, a receipt, a champagne cork—until he found whatever it was and held it out. My first view was a reflection in the darkening glass, but I couldn’t believe what I was seeing, so I turned and stared at the real thing.

“Take it,” he said, but my arms hung heavy at my sides, as if I were carrying weights.

“It’s a ring,” I said, like an idiot.

My reluctance to hold it—even to touch it—was not so much a state of mind as a physical impediment. It was an ache in my brain and in my fingers; a shiver in the vicinity of my heart. Cory opened my hand and laid it on my palm, and I peered at it through the half-light. It was a silvery, complicated thing: an elaborate whirl of curlicues and Celtic knots. It was the sort of ring Stella would have liked. Perhaps I liked it too.

“Aren’t you going to put it on?”