“I was just having breakfast and checking for any updates from Dan. Let me just prop you up against... There we go. How are you?”
“I’m—”
“Have you heard from him?”
“Dan? No.” Daisy had been so distracted by Tom andOrlandothat any worry she’d had from not hearing from her brother had been momentarily forgotten. She still felt he was okay, but his silence was unusual. She picked up the bacon sandwich she’d made, ready to bite into it. “I’ll do a deep dive later and see if I can find out anything.”
“Do a what?” her mum asked, more aggressively than was required.
“A deep dive. It’s a... don’t worry. How are you otherwise?” Daisy took a bite of her sandwich, putting it down.
“How do you think? I’m not eating. Not sleeping. Billy From Next Door has asked his nephew in America to send over some melatonin gummies.”
“That’s sweet of him.” Her mum insisted on calling him Billy From Next Door despite the fact she and Dan heard about Billy so much that they didn’t need the extended reference after his name. He’d been their mum’s long suffering neighbor for the last ten years and was a bit like a surrogate husband to Daisy’s mum, but without any of the fun or affection thrown in for him. Dan had in fact named him Silly Billy because it was so obvious he was chasing after a romance with their mum, when she only ever seemed to want a relationship with her kids.
“HowisBilly?” Daisy asked. She heard Dan whisperSilly Billyin her head and it immediately made her wish he were there. She found her mum so much easier to deal with when Dan was around too. Switching her phone to speaker, she began her search, typing Dan’s handle:ohdannybooooyinto Instagram. It was the song their mum used to sing to him at bedtime.
“Billy? Fine. Why?” She didn’t see anything unusual about her friendship with the guy next door, even though they had dinner together most nights and he hadn’t had a girlfriend since he met her, nor did he seem to have any interest in finding one.
“Just haven’t seen him for a while.” Daisy was only half concentrating on the conversation as she looked through Dan’s photos. He hadn’t added any new ones since he left for his trip. His last one was a photo of the worddeparturesand underneath he’d writtenlaters bitches!She started checking the comments beneath his older photos, in case of any new ones, and there was one three days ago, under a photo Dan had posted in the summer of his Nike trainer and the edge of his skateboard.“Yeah, dude!”BlakeSutherlandhad written. Blake. Blake sounded American. She clicked on his name and went on to his profile. It was locked. Daisy moved to Dan’s followers, scrolling down.CoryEscondido.Daisy clicked on it and landed on his wide-open, zero-security profile and there, in his most recentsquare, was a giant photo of her brother’s face. His wild curly hair and big brown eyes staring directly at the camera as he balanced a piece of corn above his top lip.
“Oh my God,” Daisy said. The photo was posted one day ago. Location: Escondido. Her mum spoke at exactly the same time.
“How are the wedding plans go—JesusChrist,Lionel, will you...” Her voice faded and Daisy stared into her brother’s eyes as she waited, checking for any signs something was up. Lionel was the dog—the other love of Daisy’s mum’s life—and until Dan’s disappearance not a call had gone by without her mum having to shout at, fuss over or talk nonstop about him. Over the last few weeks, Daisy had forgotten he even existed. “Would you believe he was just trying to swallow down my Pilates band? Which, actually, might explain where the other two have gone...” she said, her voice fading. “I better call the vet. Sorry, what were we saying about Dan?”
Daisy paused, her eyes still on her brother’s face. “Nothing,” she said. There was obviously a reason he hadn’t told them where he was. Maybe he needed a break from them.
For the first time, Daisy had started imagining herself in Dan’s position. “You’re the man of the house now, Dan,” her mum had said to him after their dad died, leaning on him in a way that was perhaps too much for a ten-year-old. Daisy had been fifteen, and her own sadness meant she was usually in the skate park with her friends and a bottle of vodka, instead of at home. She wasn’t around as much as she should have been, and when she’d ask Dan what he’d done that day, usually it was nothing. Their mum was in no fit state to go anywhere. She didn’t see anyone. Wouldn’t make decisions. It took months of gentle encouragement for him to reshape their mum into some kind of functional human being, and only now was Daisy beginning to realize it hadn’t been his job.
“I’ll keep looking though,” she added, and her mum wasgone, off to call the vet to retrieve her Pilates equipment from Lionel’s intestine. Not to use again, hopefully.
It meant Daisy had avoided the wedding question at least, and for that she was relieved. Every time she tried to imagine the day, she got as far as the aisle and it was as though her brain wouldn’t allow her to go any further. She got stuck there, not moving. “It’s all part of the avoidant disorder,” Zack would assure her.
To distract herself, she googled her first worst fear,body found Escondido, her chest pounding at the very top headline which was, indeed, about a body being found in Escondido. Of course it was, because that was exactly what she’d typed in. It took her a moment to notice the date and acknowledge that this had happened two years earlier and, unless she was in some weird alternate reality, it couldn’t possibly be Dan. It wasn’t the little brother who’d crawled into her bed after a bad dream, or once eaten the entire wing roulette at Nando’s without breaking a sweat. Beneath that was everything from a hit-and-run to a story about wastewater which nearly sent Daisy down an Erin Brockovich rabbit hole. None were about Dan. He was, most probably, just taking some time for himself and Daisy didn’t really want to think about why.
Putting her phone on the table beside her, she pulled outOrlando.
“So how was the ceilidh?” Clara asked Daisy when they met at Borough Market later that day for lunch. “Did I miss out? I did, didn’t I? Do we need to go again?”
“Absolutely not,” Daisy answered. “Also, I kind of told Zack you went, so it’s almost like youwerethere, in a way.”
Clara held her burger to the side and leaned into one of the stalls to inspect some cheese, before leaning back and taking a bite. “How come?” she asked through her mouthful.
Daisy’s shoulders tightened. She hadn’t been lying when she told Zack she was going to the ceilidh with Clara, but she hadn’tseen him since to tell him the truth. And the longer it went on, the less likely it was that she would. “I haven’t told him about Tom,” she said. “Or I have, but just that I’ve found a photographer. Online.” She grimaced. “It just felt less... complicated. Not mentioning the bus andOrlandoand everything.”
Clara frowned. “You’re about to marry the man. Surely he can’t be worried that you’re helping some guy on a bus win back his ex-girlfriend? It doesn’t exactly screamaffair.”
“I know,” Daisy said, her own burger turning solid in her stomach. “He just gets a bit funny about other men sometimes. He trusts me, he just doesn’t trustthem. Plus he knows how naive I am. You know like the barista next to our office who was giving me the odd free coffee and I thought he was just being nice? Zack couldn’t believe how long it had been going on for with me just going back to him, not really realizing I might have been leading him on. I’m worried he’ll think it’s the same with Tom, and I don’t want to lose our wedding photographer over it.”Or my job, she thought.
The faster Daisy spoke, the closer Clara listened, her eyes fixed on Daisy’s face as though she were running some sort of scan. She adjusted her Chicago Bulls baseball cap—a gift Leisha had sent over before she left for Antarctica, and pulled at her lip, swallowing.
“That barista gave all of us free coffees,” she said. “You know that, right? To thank us for being such loyal customers.”
Daisy frowned. “I think I did tell Zack that, but he laughed.”
Clara stood still as though she were waiting for something, but Daisy wasn’t sure what. Eventually they wandered out of the market, toward the path that would lead them to the Globe Theatre and on to the Tate Modern.
“So the ceilidh?” Clara asked eventually.
