PART 1 — THE SUN
Neve told me she was going down to the stand at the far end.
I watched her go the whole way. I remember thinking she had got tall over the winter and that I would need to do something about her school skirt.
Twenty minutes later her towel was still next to mine, her sandals were on top of it, and her phone was face down in her bag.
Lifeguards went into the water. Police did the toilets, the car park, the hotels, every road off Calder Strand.
They found the ice cream stand. Nobody working it remembered her.
They found nothing at all.
She was wearing a turquoise cover-up my mother sewed her that spring. Marta embroidered her initials inside the hem, N. V., because my mother put her initials inside everything she ever made.
On the first day of that trip Neve caught a corner of it on a bit of driftwood and put a hole in it, and my mother stitched a crooked little yellow sun over the tear, and Neve laughed and said she liked it better ruined.
That is the last thing I ever saw my daughter wear. I have one photograph of her in it, taken about forty minutes before she walked off.
Eight years later Peder talked me into a weekend at Portmell, which is nearly six hundred miles from Calder Strand, and which was the entire point.
I had not willingly walked onto a beach since 2017.
We were going past a café near the boardwalk and there was a woman standing with her back to me, fifty-something, holding a coffee.
Faded turquoise.
I told myself that half the women on that coast own something turquoise and I made myself keep walking.
Then the wind came up off the water and lifted one corner of the hem.
And there was the sun.
I do not remember crossing that terrace.
“Excuse me. Where did you get that?”
She looked down at herself and then back at me. “I’ve had this years.”
“Where did you get it?”
My hands were going so badly I dropped my phone twice before I got the photograph open.
I held it up. My daughter on the sand in that exact garment, squinting, forty minutes left.
The woman stopped moving.
She looked at that screen for a very long time. Long enough that people at the next table noticed.
Then she looked past me, over my shoulder, at something down the boardwalk.
And her hand came out and closed round my wrist.
“Put that away,” she said, quietly. “She can’t know you’re here.”
PART 2 — THE VIGIL
Two years after Neve went, there was a thing at the community hall in Calder Strand. About thirty people. Candles, a table with her photograph, somebody from the local paper.
I had done six of those. They keep a case alive and I would do six hundred more.
My mother asked to say something.
Marta Lennox was seventy-four and she had sewn that cover-up and she had not spoken at any of the previous ones, and I should have understood what it meant that she wanted to.
She got up and took the microphone and she got about eleven words in.
She said, “There are things on that laptop that this family hasn’t—”
And I came across that hall and took the microphone out of my mother’s hand.
I did it in front of thirty people. A woman from the paper. Two officers standing at the back. Neve’s two closest friends from school.
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