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laughed, and once he did we were off the hook. She could always get out of anything.”
    “What about the time she stayed with us, and Mum caught you both drinking her stash of wine?” Elle said.
    “Rose threatened to call the police,” Jane said.
    “Rose is our mother,” Elle clarified for the group.
    “But Alexandra told her that she’d call the police because our sitting-room carpet was a crime against taste.”
    “Mum nearly lost it,” Elle said. “I could hear her screaming from where I was in my bed, but Alexandra didn’t care.”
    “Alexandra was too drunk to care,” Jane said. “She called Rose an old lush and challenged her to a drinking competition.” She started to laugh. “I’ve never seen Rose turn purple before or since.” Jane laughed some more before falling silent. “Rose walked away. Of course I got it in the neck for the next couple of weeks, but it didn’t matter because Alexandra had got the best of the old bat. That kept me going for years.”
    “Again, you’d have to know our mother,” Elle said.
    “She did talk about you,” Tom said to Jane, having remembered some of Alexandra’s stories involving the girl who dropped off the grid after having a baby. Alexandra had felt guilty about losing the friendship with Jane. She had talked about reconnecting with her but never found the will or the time.
    Leslie was smiling. “She sounds interesting.”
    “She is,” Tom said. “She’s amazing.” He fell silent, and his mind traveled to the dark place, and the weight of his worry permeated the small space.
    His sadness was overwhelming, and Elle became desperate to change the vibe. “What about you, Leslie, do you have a story to tell?”
    “No,” Leslie said, and she smiled because during their short acquaintance she had come to realize that Elle was not the kind of person to take no for an answer.
    “Liar,” Elle said. “Everyone has a story.”
    They fell into silence again, lost in their own thoughts. Tom was still lost in the hell he’d created in his head. Jane’s mind took her into the past before Kurt, when she and Alexandra were making plans to travel the world. Elle was busy working out what she could do to make everything better.
    “I could set up a website,” Leslie said. “We could go viral.”
    “Now you’re talking!” Elle said, and she clapped.
    “I’ve no idea what ‘going viral’ means,” Jane said, “but I like the sound of it.”
    “Jane?” Elle said. “When is my next exhibition?”
    “First week in February.”
    “How soon could we do another one?”
    “What have you got in mind?” Jane asked.
    “Faces.” Elle grinned. “How about I paint the faces of missing people, a collection of twelve to include Alexandra. I could start as soon as I’ve finished this last painting for February.”
    “I could definitely get media attention,” said Jane.
    “Good,” Elle said. “Let’s do it.”
    After seventeen weeks and two days of hopelessness, recrimination, confusion, frustration, fear, and suffering, three strangers opened their hearts to Tom, and they were kind enough to pretend they didn’t notice when he cried.

3

“Can’t Get Bitter”
It’s so easy to be cynical, you just turn on your TV screen
and everyone tells you who you should be.
When I feel stupid, disenchanted,
those pretty flowers that he planted,
the pollen comes floating down the breeze.
Jack L, Broken Songs
December 2007
    It was just after eleven on the morning of New Year’s Eve and Elle was standing at the back of her garden, knotting her long brown hair before picking up the shovel from the ground. Her ritual had changed from late evening to late morning many years previously on account of it getting in the way of her social life.
    Jane emerged from the big house and made her way down the patio steps and toward her sister, who was unaware of her and busy staring into the middle distance. Jane often noticed Elle staring at something unseen by anyone else,