***

“Is it just me or did today get really, really weird?”

Cat and I were lying with our heads together in the middle of a bed so vast it needed three sets of pillows to span its width. We were sharing the middle one, our bodies a small island in a sea of bed. I made a little ha sound. Cat raised her eyebrows.

“Say it,” she said. “No one can hear you. We’re in the guest wing.”

I pulled a face.

“Say it.” Cat took the covers and pulled them up over our heads. “How about now?” Our eyes held in the dusky gloom of the sheets. “Say it.”

“God, I don’t know.”

“You don’t know or you don’t like to say?” Cat said. “Don’t tell me you can’t see it, Robyn. Willa’s family is seriously fucked up.”

***

In the morning Willa brought us tea and then sat on the bed with us, taking us through a box chock-full of the newspaper cuttings she’d collected about Laika, stories that ranged from serious pieces of journalism to tabloid reports of clairvoyants who’d wanted money in exchange for speculative titbits and implausible sightings. Later she showed me Laika’s room, unlocking the door to let me into the sad untouched shrine of it, the belongings of a thirteen-year-old left exactly as they were the day she’d disappeared. After a bit I joined her at the window.

“Sorry about yesterday. You probably guessed this,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper, “but things aren’t that great between my parents.”

I took a moment to answer, trying to find something tactful to say. “It must have put a huge strain on them when Laika disappeared.”

“In some ways that’s the one thing that keeps them together.”

“You mean they support each other?”

“No.” She turned to face me, then added in a voice so low I could barely make out the words, “I mean Mum won’t leave the house.”

“D’you want to talk about it?”

She shook her head, and I pulled her into a hug.

***

We’d originally planned to stay the whole of Sunday, but instead we invented an excuse that meant we would need to leave after breakfast, and Bianka drove us back to the station, stopping off en route to collect the puppy from the vet. I’d already called my dad and he’d said there was always room for one more dog at theirs, and that if we could get the little floofball to London he’d happily drive up and collect him from ours. It made me grateful to think I had parents I could call in a crisis. I was even more glad to get away from the strange atmosphere of that cold, silent house. I realized I couldn’t wait to get home to our tiny, noisy flat, where the beat of other people’s music pulsed through the walls, and we had neighbors who laughed and shouted and argued and hugged.

We came to love that flat in the end. We lived there far beyond the time we could afford to move out. I asked Cat to marry me in its tiny galley kitchen, and it was the home we went back to after our civil partnership, and after our honeymoon in Greece. Our parents visited whenever they could, our brothers too. We held parties there that gradually became less wild over time, and eventually Cat got to indulge her love of the Scandi aesthetic, buying patterned rugs and vintage furniture with clean lines. It was a good place, a good home. But all the time we were saving like mad.

***

With no small sense of wonder we arrived at our thirties. Both of us registered some deep subliminal change, a growing-up. We were ready for the next stage of our lives, one that had been a long time in the planning. I met Willa at Postman’s Park to tell her our news. I’d moved to St. Bart’s by then and she had a job in a call center that she had repeatedly assured me was the absolute worst. I told her first about the Victorian terrace we’d found to buy in Forest Hill, a proper house, with three bedrooms and a jungle out the back which the agent had said had the potential to be a “perfect outdoor space” with a small amount of work. A doer-upper, I said. Cat would be in charge.

I smiled at her. I’d held on to the best news for last. “I’m pregnant,” I said, “twelve weeks.” Willa’s mouth opened in surprise.

“Oh my God,” she said, each word falling over the next. She buried her head in my shoulder. “I’m so, so happy for you.”

She held me so tight I thought she might not ever let me go. Gently, I pulled away. There were tears brimming over the lids of her eyes. She wiped a hand across her cheek. The tears fell.

“I’m so happy for you,” she said again. She laughed, then cried some more. “Honestly, I don’t know why I’m crying. I’m ridiculously happy for you, so, so happy.”

***

She cried again the day she first met Sophie at the hospital, holding our beautiful, precious daughter in her arms. For a long, secret time she gazed into our child’s face, as silent tears worked tracks over the curve of her cheeks. She was so very far away that eventually Cat looked at me, her face etched with concern. Willa had gone somewhere that didn’t include us. With a delicate finger she touched our daughter’s cheek. Her tears continued to fall, but whether they were tears for a newborn, for Laika, for herself or for a child she didn’t yet have, I didn’t ever ask.

14 Body Parts Willa

I first met Jamie at a bar in St. Paul’s. At that time I was working a three-month contract making props for a low-budget horror movie. My employer was a small, furious Scot in his fifties called Fen Roberts. He had a shock of sandy hair, strung-out eyes, and periodically panicked about our rate of production. After my first couple of weeks I came to suspect that Fen had undercut any other bidders for the job by some considerable margin. Most of the other temps were students from Eastern Europe who spent the day laughing, gesturing with their hands and talking at speed in a language I didn’t understand. They also took regular breaks for coffee and cigarettes, which made Fen apoplectic with rage, something that amused the students to no end. My job was to dob fake blood on various body parts. They needed a lot of dismembered limbs.

I’d arranged to meet Robyn for a rare, snatched drink after work. I saw so little of her in those days, less and less it seemed. Sophie was already a toddler by then and Cat was expecting the twins, so she was always keen to get home.

I arrived before her, of course. I found myself a tiny table tucked away in a corner and was half reading my book, half watching a group of three women, when I realized a man was smiling at me. A slow smile of approval, full of promise. He was standing at the bar on his own. I checked around to see if the smile was meant for someone else, then back at my book. The next time I looked up, he smiled at me again. He looked a bit older than me, with a large leonine head, a broad nose, tawny hair that curled over the back of his collar, a strong jaw and clear blue eyes. Handsome too, ridiculously so. A lock of hair fell across his face and he brushed it out of his eyes. I reckon he’s an actor, I thought, an actor who specializes in period dramas, a natural at playing a crowd, he’s got that confidence about him, the smile of a man who knows he’s the best-looking male in the room. Then Robyn arrived. Behind her back, as she bent over and kissed my cheek, he grinned at me and shrugged his shoulders apologetically, Just missed my chance.

The next night I went back. I told myself I didn’t have any particular reason to hurry home, which was true enough. He was there again, standing at the bar, but if he clocked me coming in, he didn’t let me know. I found my seat in the corner and took out my book, Great Expectations. I hooked a stray piece of hair over my ear and propped my chin on my hand. Then I read.

The next thing I knew he was standing in front of me.

“If this was a blind date,” he said, “I’d be looking for the girl who said she’d be reading a trashy novel”—I held up the book to show him the cover—“or, indeed, Dickens, one of the great classics. I’m impressed. Jamie Casteele,” he said. “May I?” He didn’t wait for a reply. “Let me guess, you’re a visiting professor of comparative literature swinging through London to give a TED talk at UCL.”

It was almost impossible not to warm to his wicked grin. “Nothing like that,” I said. “I just wanted to read English at university.”

“You wanted to. So you didn’t.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

I took a breath. “I wasn’t in a good place.” I was going to leave it at that, but Jamie waited in silence, giving me a look of such patient concern that eventually I added, “My little sister disappeared. Snatched, I mean. She’s been gone twenty years.”

“Jesus. I’m sorry to hear that.”

I hadn’t expected him to be so kind. A thing like a large, smooth stone appeared in my neck, painfully huge. I couldn’t speak.

Jamie paused, then said, “How do you move on from a thing like that? God, it must be hard.”

I couldn’t answer that. The truth is, I’d never moved on. I’d never returned to finish my A Levels or gone on to uni, even though both my parents had told me I should. I hadn’t had a career, just a series of jobs. I hadn’t had a lasting relationship either. I’d dated over the years, of course I had, but things had never worked out. And it had always been me who’d ended things, me who’d made the decision that something intangible wasn’t quite right. I was a master of self-sabotage. I longed for a family, but I’d never got to the point where that was even being discussed. And time was running out.

“Here,” Jamie said, “give me your hand.” His was large, and warm. He held my fingers in his. He took a pen from his top pocket and wrote a number on the back of my hand. His head was bent close to mine, as if we were sharing a secret. He was so close that I could see the individual hairs bedded into his chin. His hair smelt clean. He wore a blue tie, and his pink shirt was crisp and expensive-looking, City clothes. Underneath the number he wrote jamie in capital letters that lifted and dipped across the bones of my hand.

“Ball’s in your court,” he said. “Call me.” His smile was open, sincere.

Two days later, we had our first date.

***

At forty-one he was five years older than me, with the easy confidence of a man who had his life pretty much set up the way he wanted: a nice car, a big group of friends, a career as an ambassador for Pearl River Wines that took him all over the world. He was easygoing and had a huge sense of the ridiculous. On dates I found him expansive, generous and irreverent, with a boyish charm he knew how to work. Watch and learn, he’d breathe, as he moved forward to beguile a waitress into giving us the best table in the house.

“I love an upgrade,” he told me in bed late one night. “It’s kind of like a secret challenge, working out what I can bag for free.” He laughed then, pulling me toward him and growling in my ear, “You should see me when I don’t get what I want.”