All the same . . . Now that I come to think of it, I’m not sure I ever wholeheartedly liked him. I was always wary of what he might do or say. I found his confidence impressive, and he had a great line in entertaining rants, but I also felt unsettled by him. He suggested more activities that I felt a strong and defensive need to resist than most people I knew: marathon boozing sessions, terrifying-sounding hikes up the sides of remote mountains, unpleasant prank campaigns against anyone that any of us disliked.

He was interesting and unpredictable, and could liven up a room purely by walking into it.

He had a strange habit of bursting in, like a cowboy crashing into a barroom, about to pull a gun. Instead of a gun, Lewis would typically produce an unexpected declaration of some kind, something that made everyone look up and take notice. It could be anything from “Your lord and king is here, motherfuckers!” to “Hey, Dom, Beth—your next-door neighbor’s wanking over his computer. I’ve identified the optimal vantage point, if you want to catch some of the action.”

He was horrified when we all said we had no desire to watch. “What is wrong with you freaks?” he yelled, actually upset that we were missing out. “It’s the most grotesque and embarrassing thing you’re likely to see all year! You’re a bunch of fucking philistines.”

Dom was right: Lewis Braid was weird, and he could be a giant pain in the arse, but we’d have had less fun without him around, no doubt about it. Life would have been much less colorful.

I read a few of the posts he’s put on his Twitter page. There’s no hint of his more outrageous side here. It’s all bland and professional: “Small can be beautiful at VersaNova—great team, fantastic colleagues and a mission worth working for!” “It’s a beautiful day for the opening of the ATARM conference here in Tampa, Florida. Proud to be one of the sponsors of this fantastic event, April 18–20!” “VersaNova named in @technovators Top 10 Tech Companies to Watch in 2019” “Great to see our technology director Sheryl Sotork featured in CapInvest Magazine” “‘Patient Capital Delivers Results’—thrilled to be one of the software companies featured in this article.”

I don’t know what I was hoping for. “Hey, guys, it’s a bit strange but my oldest two children seem to have stopped growing . . .”

I keep scrolling farther down, reading tweets from last week, last month, the end of last year. Lewis doesn’t post on here very often—only once or twice a month. There’s nothing interesting in December last year, or November.

Wait. What’s this?

In October, he posted a link to what looks like an Instagram account in his name. I click to open it. I have no idea what a grown man’s account might look like. I’m more familiar with Instagram than with Twitter or LinkedIn. Zannah sometimes shows me selfies posted there by girls at her school and asks me if I think they’re flames, mingers or donkeys, which apparently, as everyone who is not “so lame” knows, are the only three categories.

Soon I’m staring at a photograph of Lewis on the deck of a boat, with a beautiful sunset behind him. He’s been much more active on Instagram than he has on Twitter. There are a lot of photos on his page. I work through them methodically, opening them one by one: Lewis bare-chested in denim shorts, holding up a fish, Lewis with two other people, walking along a . . .

Two other people.

Are they . . . ?

I try to tell myself that I can’t possibly know for certain, but I do. It’s them. It’s Thomas and Emily. Teenagers. As they should be. This is how the children I knew twelve years ago would look now. When I look at their faces, I have the same feeling I had when I first saw Lewis’s photograph on Twitter: absolute recognition.

If this is them, then who were the Thomas and Emily you saw in Hemingford Abbots?

Suddenly I feel dizzy, as if I’m tumbling forward without anything to stop me from falling. I hold on to the sides of Dom’s desk with both hands and breathe deliberately until the fuzzy dots in my head start to clear.

Come on, Beth, get a grip. Nothing has changed, except in a good way. If these two golden, perfect, healthy-looking teenagers are Thomas and Emily Braid—and they are, I know they are—then they didn’t die and get replaced by a new Thomas and Emily. And, all right, I still don’t know who the two children were that I saw at 16 Wyddial Lane, but I never knew that, and so nothing has changed, nothing is any more frightening now than it was before. The Hemingford Abbots children could never have been Thomas and Emily Braid; they were too young. I should have known that from the start. I did know it, but I didn’t fully believe it—not until I saw these photographs.

Do all Florida teenagers look radiant, sun-kissed and wholesome or is it just Lewis Braid’s children? They certainly all seem to have a great life in America. Lewis’s Instagram is an apparently endless pictorial log of every pleasure available to humankind: glasses of champagne, cheese-and-salsa-drizzled nachos, sunsets, beaches, swimming pools, balcony terraces in fancy-looking restaurants . . .

I take in all these things at a glance, but I don’t care enough about the details to look at them properly. The Braids are lucky and rich; I knew that already. Now, in Florida, they’re luckier and richer. Of course they are.

Thomas and Emily are all I’m interested in. I scroll down, hoping for more photos of them.

Here’s Emily in very short black shorts, a long, floaty white blouse and a red-and-navy-blue-bead ankle bracelet. Thomas, in the most recent pictures, has a surfboard under his arm and sun-bleached hair almost down to his shoulders. Unlike his sister, he seems to favor longer shorts, right down to his knees.

His sister . . .

My breath catches in my throat.

Georgina. Where is she?

I search two, three times to make sure. She isn’t here. There are no children in these pictures apart from Thomas and Emily. And no Flora either.

Why would Lewis fill his Instagram with many pictures of two of his children, but none of the third? And none of his wife?

A memory surfaces suddenly, from the last time we were all together. Lewis said that if he were Thomas or Emily, he would hate Georgina, because now their parents’ sizable estate would have to be divided between three people instead of two. Instantly, Flora looked unhappy. She often used to roll her eyes at him affectionately, as if he were a lovable but disobedient puppy, but this time she looked seriously uncomfortable. He put his arm around her and said, “I’m joking. Relax. There’s plenty for everyone.”

I only saw Georgina once, but she was a beautiful baby. And Lewis loves to show off all the wonderful things in his life—this Instagram account is proof of that—so why not Georgina? Why not Flora?

Other questions crowd my mind: Why wasn’t Georgina in the car yesterday? Why did Flora start crying when she spoke to Chimpy on the phone? Is there some kind of pattern here that I’m missing?

Has something happened to Georgina Braid? No, there’s no reason to think that. Flora’s not in these pictures either, and I know nothing’s happened to her. I saw her yesterday.

I did. I saw her. The rest of what I saw makes no sense, granted—but nothing is going to persuade me that I didn’t see Flora.

I think back to the conversation at the kitchen table. When I told Zannah that the Braids had a third child in addition to the two I was sure I’d seen that day, Dom said, “Did they?” He didn’t seem to know. If I hadn’t told him, would he have remembered? Did he remember, genuinely, or did he simply take my word for it, assuming that I was bound to know better than him?

No. It’s not possible that I imagined the existence of Georgina Braid. I can prove I didn’t. It’s the easiest thing in the world: all I’d need to do is dig out the pieces of a photograph I cut up many years ago and then kept, in its vandalized form, because it felt like the only way I could make amends for that small act of violence.

I stay where I am.

Of course Georgina Braid was real. I don’t need to prove anything to anyone. I’m not crazy.

4

“It’s seven in the morning, Beth.” Dom blinks as I pull open the bedroom curtains. “I’ve been awake less than five minutes.”

“I’m not asking you to do it now.”

“I need coffee before I do anything.”

“In the kitchen, all ready. Proper tar sludge.” My name for Dom’s preferred style of coffee is a running joke, as is his for mine: beige water.

“Thanks, but . . . Beth, I’m not bothering Lewis Braid. If you want to, fine, but I don’t.”

“I’m not on Twitter, LinkedIn or Instagram, and he’s not on Facebook—or at least, I didn’t find him there if he is. I’m asking you to send him one little message, that’s all.”

“Saying what? How are you after all these years, and are your children by any chance five and three in Hemingford Abbots as well as being seventeen and fifteen in Florida?”

“Obviously not that.”

“Then what?”

“Just ‘How are you?’ would be a start.”

Dom laughs. “I see. So this one message, the only one I needed to send a minute ago, is now ‘a start.’ Start of what? A long back-and-forth?”