I bought a dress, too, in the post-Christmas sales, but I didn’t try it on in the shop and it’s not a great fit. I ought to stop tugging at the skirt and wriggling my shoulders, but I do it without thinking. Poppy—my school friend—joins Stella on the sofa-cum-trampoline, and so does Zoë, and then “Dancing Queen” comes on, and even Aunty May starts singing and tapping her knee in a dry kind of way. Dad rolls his eyes at me, and Tom comes over with a plate of mince pies.

“Are you all right?” he says.

I take a mince pie and tell him I’m fine.

“How are you?” I ask in turn. After all, it is only a month since Natalie left.

“Oh, you know. Not bad.”

Stella turns the music up full blast while Tom is still talking.

“What?” I push my hair aside so that he can speak into my ear.

“Thank you for asking,” he yells. I smile and shrug, and he smiles back.

Dad pauses the CD when the plumber reappears, and they go into the hallway to talk. Stella jumps off the sofa, breathless, and starts refilling everyone’s glass to the brim, deaf to protests.

When she reaches me, she looks me up and down, puts the bottle on the table, and adjusts my dress—first around the neckline, then around the hips. She picks up a length of my hair and lets it fall again, before taking a step back and shaking her head.

“Must you wear your hair down?”

“You’re wearing yours down.”

“Yes, but I . . . oh, never mind. It doesn’t matter. I will always love you.”

I open my mouth to retort, then close it. There’s no point calling her out on it—not here, anyway, not now. She’ll just say, “What? What’s wrong with saying I love you, you paranoid freak?”

Anyway, the moment is gone. The music is loud again, and Stella is prancing with Zoë on the rug—all smiles and laughter and “Gimme, gimme, gimme” at the top of her voice.

Chapter 7

7

Cory and I skidded down the cliff path, clutching one another’s hands in the dusk. We had left it too late, really, to start searching for my phone.

“Hang on.” Cory tapped his own screen. “Let’s try calling it again.”

“But if it fell out of my pocket when I was talking to Maggie, the tide—”

“Shh!”

We stopped and listened. Nothing. Nothing but the faint brrr from Cory’s phone and the hush of the waves. I scanned the beach for a pinprick of light, but all I could see was greying sand, and black seaweed, and sweeping arcs of shingle.

Cory tried again at the bottom of the path.

“It’s still ringing,” he said, “which implies it’s not been washed away—”

“Shh!”

We froze, hand in hand, until it went to voice mail.