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page been torn out? What had been on it? She pushed the journal back towards the bag as if returning it to the backpack would stop the stream of doubts rushing forwards, but in her hurry the journal fell free of her hands, and as it spilled to the floor, something glided from its pages.
    Bending to retrieve it, she saw it was the stub of Mia’s first boarding pass: London Heathrow to San Francisco. Her fingers moved across the smooth white card as she thought about Mia arriving in San Francisco full of the anticipation of traveling. Shetried picturing the places Mia visited, wondering about the people she had met, imagining what she might have experienced—but Mia’s travels were a mystery, six lost months Katie was desperate to understand. Six months that the journal held the key to.
    As she held Mia’s plane ticket between her fingers, an idea began to form.
    *   *   *
    Katie barely slept that night as the idea shaped itself into a purpose. The next morning she rose early and strode into Putney High Street searching for a travel agency. She placed Mia’s itinerary on the desk of a woman who wore coral-pink lipstick on cracked lips. “I would like to book the same route.”
    She could have done it online, but felt the decision was too important to be made on the click of a button. Perhaps she had anticipated hesitation from the saleswoman, as if someone would tell her this was a foolish, impulsive idea, but instead the lady had taken a sip from her steaming mug of coffee, then simply asked, “When would you like to go?”
    Now, five days later, she sat on the wooden floorboards in her bedroom trying to pack. The contents of Mia’s backpack fanned around her feet, and her own clothes waited tentatively in half-built piles within a purple suitcase. She was usually a decisive and methodical packer, but she had no clue what to pack for this trip. In a few hours she was due to board a flight to San Francisco, exactly as Mia had done six months earlier.
    Her bedroom door opened and Ed entered, carrying two mugs of tea. He passed her one and then lowered himself onto the floor beside her, his suit pants pulling tight across his knees and revealing half an inch of skin above his socks.
    She took a sip of tea. He made it exactly how she liked it: not too strong, a generous splash of milk and half a spoonful of sugar.
    He eyed the piles of belongings skeptically. “There’s still time to change your mind. Work would have you back, you know.”
    She had quit her job as a senior recruitment consultant as she’d walked back from the travel agency. After dedicating herself to the same company since graduation, she had only needed a five-minute phone call to leave. “I can’t go back.” The idea of returning to the office, taking a seat at her corner desk beneath the air-conditioning vent that aggravated her eyes, and pretending that placing candidates was still important to her seemed utterly ludicrous.
    “Why not wait a few weeks? I am almost certain I’ll be able to juggle a vacation. We could go together . . . not everywhere, but Bali. You can see where—”
    “I need to start this from the beginning.” Katie’s coping mechanism was structure. After her mother’s death, she had ruthlessly filled her diary with social engagements, taking command of every free hour that might otherwise have been idled away in the folds of self-pity. She attacked her job with equal vigor, working around the clock with such steely focus that, three months later, she got a promotion.
    Losing Mia felt different. Work and social distractions were no match for her grief, which was thick and black. Finding Mia’s travel journal seemed like a small glimmer of light in the gloom, so she had made a decision to follow it, entry by entry, country by country, in the hope that retracing Mia’s steps would help her to understand her death. For the first time since the police arrived on her doorstep, Katie felt as if she had a sense of