Rav had been in a bad mood all day, and while Chloe was usually quite happy to jolly him along, since his announcement that they were going to see Max she had rather lost her taste for it. And, anyway, it was his own fault that he was hung over. He and Guy had hit the bottle hard, Guy presumably because it had been so long since he had been allowed out, and Rav in solidarity. He had spent the day lying on the sofa watching cricket with the sound turned off and the curtains closed, complaining that his head hurt and asking Chloe to bring him glasses of cold water. Eventually, she had gone into the bedroom and shut the door, told Rav to have a sleep on the sofa until he felt better and told herself that she was going to spend the afternoon Marie Kondo-ing her wardrobe. But then she’d found a black silk dress buried under some old jumpers. It had Zadie’s name taped in the label. All Zadie’s clothes had been labelled, because she had gone to boarding school. She took the dress out, and before she could stop herself she was peeling off her clothes and putting it on. She hadn’t worn it since Zadie had disappeared. It was dated now. And too small for her. But running her hands over it felt like going home.

Did Zadie still dress in the mad, beautiful way she had when they were teenagers? Or would she have turned out like her mother, neat in cashmere and silk, buying her clothes from a handful of boutiques and having them all tailored so that they fitted perfectly?

After she had given in to the dress, it seemed pointless to try to resist all the other cravings. Her fingers were itching. So she peeled off the dress, hung it back in the wardrobe then let the floodgates open. As usual, she started by typing various different Zadie-related search terms into Google – her name, her full name, her full name with her date of birth – then had a little look on the major social platforms. Five minutes, tops. Nothing ever came up. But because Rav had been so resolutely grumpy and she had nothing else to do it was too hard to resist going in for a proper deep dive, the sort she had stopped allowing herself years ago. She looked up all Zadie’s siblings, whose privacy settings were up to the max. Searched for her parents, her cousins. She even read the newsletter of the village she grew up in, as if Zadie was going to be mentioned for winning a cake-baking contest or growing a really big carrot. Still nothing came up. Then it occurred to Chloe that some people had their social media accounts under nicknames, so she had tried out various ideas. An hour later she was exhausted, and faintly ashamed of herself for getting sucked into such a hole.