The fear of being unreliable to herself was a weight she couldn't carry. She felt like a ghost haunting her own life, a collection of moments that didn't quite connect. She stayed there, huddled against the cold, watching the dark water and wondering if the "bridge" Peter talked about was actually just a long way to fall.

By half five, the light was gone and Daffodil wasn't home.

Peter stood at the kitchen window, his hands flat on the scarred wood of the counter, watching the lane for the shape of her. The bus from Gwent College got in at quarter to four. Even with dawdling, even with the walk up from the stop, she should have been through the door a few hours ago. The kettle had boiled and cooled twice. The cawl was sitting on a low flame, the surface barely trembling.

He picked up the phone—the old landline mounted on the kitchen wall, its coiled cord stretched and kinked from years of pacing conversations—and dialled her mobile. It rang. And rang. And rang. The automated voicemail kicked in, her recorded voice bright and slightly breathless, a version of her from a better day. He hung up without leaving a message.

He tried again ten minutes later. Then again. The third time, the phone didn't even ring. Switched off, or dead. The battery on that thing was a disgrace—a Nokia that could survive a nuclear winter but couldn't hold a charge past lunchtime if she'd been playing Snake on the bus.

Peter pulled on his Barbour and his boots. He didn't rush. Rushing was for people who hadn't done this before.

He drove Vera down to the village first, checking the bus stop, the chip shop, the small park by the war memorial where she sometimes sat to sketch. Nothing. He drove the canal path as far as the road allowed, got out, walked a stretch in both directions, calling her name into the fog. His voice came back flat and unanswered, absorbed by the damp air and the dark water.

He got back in the car. He sat for a moment, his hands on the wheel, thinking. The canal was the obvious place—she'd been drawn to the water before—but something in his gut told him she'd gone further this time. The incident at the bike sheds, whatever had happened there, had been a trigger. And when the "drift" took her after a trigger, she didn't just wander. She moved. She covered ground as if the body was trying to outrun whatever was happening inside the head.

He turned Vera north, past Crosskeys, through Abercarn where the valley narrowed and the road began to climb between the old colliery terraces. The streetlights were sparse here, the pools of orange separated by long stretches of darkness. He drove slowly, scanning the pavements, the bus shelters, the benches outside the shuttered post offices of villages that had been slowly emptying for decades.

It was past seven when he found her.