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food isn’t as good as yours.’
    I laughed again. ‘OK, so now I know you’re lying.’ I was an
    average cook at best, with a tendency to overcook. Well, I called it
    ‘overcook’. Someone else might say ‘burn’.
    His voice softened. ‘I miss you, darling. And Anna. I wish this
    project was already over. Weekends with my favourite girls just
    aren’t cutting it at the moment.’
    I smiled. ‘Miss you, too.’ Even though we’d been together
    twenty-six years, since we were seventeen, the love we shared was
    still strong. And the passion. I still fancied the pants off him.
    I knew we were lucky in that respect. I’d known lots of childhood
    sweethearts who had broken up after they grew up and grew apart.
    26
    Where the Memories Lie
    It hadn’t happened with us, and I was really grateful for that. It hadn’t happened with Lucas or Nadia yet, either, although who
    knew what would go on after Nadia’s revelation. Was he really
    having an affair? How do you throw away all those years of history?
    We chatted some more about the building project and Anna
    and what food we were going to take on the family picnic that
    weekend, and by the time I hung up it was just after 9 p.m.
    ‘Bedtime!’ I called down to Anna from the landing.
    ‘Yeah, coming.’ She trudged up the stairs and gave me a hug.
    ‘Night, Mum.’
    She was as tall as me now. When had that happened? I snuggled
    into her, sniffing in the scent of the strawberry body spray she liked.
    It was only recently that I’d had to stop moaning to get her to have a shower every day. Overnight, it was like she went from a smelly,
    dirty kid to a super clean freak. It would be makeup next, and bras, and boys. Oh, God.
    ‘Night, darling. Love you.’
    ‘Love you, too.’
    I patted her back. ‘See you in the morning.’
    I went downstairs into the lounge. Anna had left the TV on
    and the news was playing. I didn’t usually watch it; it was too
    depressing. Why didn’t they ever report anything good? Imagine
    the state of the world if every news channel broadcasted only happy news? The media manipulated everything, anyway, as far as I was
    concerned. Ethan didn’t agree. He liked to end his day watching the news. I couldn’t think of anything more nightmare-inducing. No
    wonder people had insomnia.
    I flicked the TV off and something Ethan said sparked in
    my head.
    Newspaper article.
    Tom didn’t watch the news but he’d always loved reading it.
    Judging from the newspapers still regularly left in a messy heap in 27
    Sibel Hodge
    his room, he still did, or at least tried to. He must’ve remembered this Georgia from a story he’d seen.
    Maybe it’s not a good trait, but I am pretty nosy. And that
    was what spurred on my curiosity about what could’ve been in
    the papers to do with this missing woman that would make Tom
    ‘remember’ it so well and become so agitated by it.
    Anna had also left the laptop on. It was the family laptop,
    although really it belonged to me and her. Ethan had his own. I was still worried about her having complete freedom to trawl the web for anything. Still worried about paedophiles grooming innocent girls.
    Even though I’d had to cave in recently and let her have her own
    Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat accounts, at least sharing a laptop meant I could monitor her online usage and make sure she was safe.
    I opened it up and sat on the sofa, knees tucked to the side,
    resting it on my thighs. I supposed Georgia wasn’t a very common
    name, but I didn’t have a surname to go on so I wasn’t expecting
    much, but I at least had to look.
    I typed in Georgia and missing person. I got pages and pages of hits. Of course. Most of them had no relation to what I was looking for. There had to be millions of missing people in the world.
    I needed to narrow it down somehow.
    Georgia, missing person, Dorset.
    That still resulted in several pages and I started scrolling
    through. There was a missing persons page on Dorset Police’s