“You should go to bed. Can I . . . ?” I point at his computer. My laptop’s in the car. I can’t be bothered to go and get it.

“Sure.” He stands up. “Look at the search history and you’ll find everything I found. It’ll make you feel better.”

“Only if realizing that I’m having psychotic delusions is a good thing,” I mutter, sliding into his chair.

“Well, no one’s dead—that’s a good thing. And I wouldn’t call it a psychotic delusion. More of a—”

“I saw Flora, Dom. And Thomas and Emily, as they were twelve years ago. I saw and heard it all, everything I described.”

He squeezes my shoulder. “I’m exhausted, Beth. We’ll talk about it again tomorrow. Okay? Want me to bring you up some reheated cannelloni before I go to sleep?”

“No, thanks. I’ll get some later.” I still don’t feel remotely hungry. “Oh—guess what they’ve called their house.”

“Who?”

“The Braids.”

“You mean the people living in the house in Hemingford Abbots that used to be the Braids’,” Dom corrects me.

“It was named by them for sure, whether they live there now or not. It’s called Newnham House. Typical Lewis. They lived in Newnham in Cambridge, so when they left Cambridge, they called their new house Newnham House, thinking it’s a nice way to remember where they used to live.”

“And . . . it isn’t?”

“No. It’s silly. It’s clinging to the past in an artificial way—trying to pretend your new place is your old place.” When Dom doesn’t look convinced, I say, “We also moved out of Newnham. If I’d suggested calling this house Newnham House, would you have agreed?”

I never told Dominic why I wanted to leave Cambridge. Or, rather, I told him, but my explanation was a lie. It had nothing to do with wanting to live closer to my mum, though that’s where we’ve ended up—in Little Holling in the Culver Valley. Mum’s about fifteen minutes away by car, in Great Holling. Every time one of her friends pops in while I’m there, she says—and her wording of the line never varies—“What with me living in Great Holling and Beth living in Little Holling, it’s like Goldilocks and the three bears!”

I’ve tried to tell her that it’s nothing like that, and that nobody knows what she means. “Of course they do!” Mum insists. Once, Zannah heard this exchange and said to me later, “You’re ruder to Gran than I am to you,” which made me feel awful.

Mum also doesn’t know why I was determined to leave Newnham, having once thought I’d live there all my life. It was because of the Braids. Once they’d left, I couldn’t bear the thought of staying there like something they’d discarded, of being the left-behind friends while they moved on to something bigger and better. If they were going to have a new start, then so were we.

“I’d happily swap the name Crossways Cottage for Newnham House,” says Dom. “Or for anything less twee. Remember, I suggested getting rid of the name and making do with 10, The Green, but you—”

“Forget it.” I wave his words away.

“Beth, I don’t see anything wrong about the house name. Sorry. Can I go to bed now?”

He doesn’t wait for an answer.

“Night,” I call after him.

Once he’s gone, I look at his computer’s search history: LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter. He’s been busy. No Facebook, though. Why didn’t he check to see if the Braids were on Facebook? I haven’t either, not once in twelve years. I assumed I knew everything I needed to know about Flora and her family. I knew they’d moved to Wyddial Lane because they sent us a “new address” postcard—nothing personal written on it, just the address, minus the house’s name. They must have added that later.

I remember thinking it odd that we’d be on their list; Flora must have known, just as I did, that our friendship was over. Why would she want me to know where she was moving to? Perhaps she thought a complete cutoff would be too stark and obvious; easier to shift to a Christmas-cards-only friendship, allowing us both to pretend nothing was wrong, that we were simply too busy ever to meet.

I go to the bottom of the list of Dom’s search results and click on the one he went to first. Might as well follow the same chronological order. I feel more alert than I have for a long time.

It’s time to find the Braids.

*

Lewis is on LinkedIn, though there’s no photograph of him, only a gray-man silhouette. So he couldn’t be bothered to upload a picture. I skim over the list of his former jobs, several of which he had while I knew him. His current position, “2015 to present,” is “CEO of VersaNova Technologies, an application software company based in Delray Beach, Florida.”

Dominic was right. How absurd that I needed to see it with my own eyes to believe it, given that my eyes have been seeing the impossible lately, in broad daylight.

Still. Lewis working for a company in America doesn’t mean Flora couldn’t have been in Hemingford Abbots this morning. Yesterday morning, I correct myself. It’s after midnight; tomorrow is now technically today.

In Lewis’s “Contact Information” there’s a VersaNova email address for him, and a link to a Twitter account. Clicking on the link, I find myself staring at his smiling face. The photo that he’s chosen to represent him on his Twitter page, the one that appears in a little circle next to each of the short messages he’s posted, is of him suntanned and grinning, wearing a black and gray baseball cap.

Like most people, after a gap of more than a decade, he looks older than when I last saw him.

Like everyone except his children, Thomas and Emily, who look exactly the same as they did twelve years ago.

His official name on Twitter is @VersaNovaLewB. I remember Ben joining Twitter and having to choose a name like that. He called himself @boycalledBen, which prompted Zannah to say that she was embarrassed to be related to him.

Lewis’s smile is exactly the same: wide and full enough to dimple his cheeks and narrow his eyes, and alarming in its intensity, as if he might be about to start teasing you in a way you’re not going to like very much. He used to do that a lot. There was no point in asking him to stop—he’d only do it more. For nearly a year he called Dominic “Rom-com Dom” after we all went to see a movie, About a Boy, that Dom liked as much as Flora and I did, despite being a man. Eventually Lewis professed to find this hilarious, though at first he found it implausible. On the way home from the cinema, he hounded Dom relentlessly: “Really? You liked it? I mean, liked liked? You actually thought it was good?”

There’s a larger photograph, a kind of personalized banner at the top of his page. This one’s a picture of Lewis and two other men in suits and ties, all grinning as if in competition to look the most triumphant. Lewis is in the middle and holding a knife, about to cut into a large, square cake covered in white icing and decorated with blue piped writing. The cake has four candles. Farther down Lewis’s Twitter page, I find this same picture again, underneath the words “Happy 4th Birthday, VersaNova Technologies!”

That was posted on January 28 of this year. So Lewis’s company is four years old.

“If it looks like it’s four, it’s probably sixteen,” I mutter, then laugh. “Like Thomas and Emily.” Sorry, Lewis. You always hated my sense of humor.

I’m exaggerating. He didn’t hate it, but he didn’t understand it either. Any joke that was eccentric or surreal, he used to object to. “But why’s that funny?” he would demand. “Tell me. I don’t get it.” His idea of funny was saying something and then contradicting it a few seconds later, especially if he knew it would disappoint you. The more crushed you looked, the funnier he found it. Like the time the four of us went on holiday together to Mexico. At Heathrow Airport, Lewis grabbed me by the arm and whispered in my ear, “Hey, see that lady over there? She said they were going to upgrade us to first class. Not just business class. First.”

“That’s amazing,” I said. “Do Dom and Flora know?” I couldn’t understand why he was telling me alone, when the other two were standing only a short distance away.

“Actually, she didn’t say that at all,” said Lewis casually. “I made it up.” Then he spent the next hour laughing at my gullibility.

Imagine if he knew that you’re gullible enough to believe Thomas and Emily haven’t aged in the last twelve years . . .

Dom’s words from earlier replay in my mind: “Lewis Braid’s a weirdo. Always was.”

We liked him, though. Didn’t we? We must have. We went on holiday with him more than once. He was one of our best friends.