Cal raised an eyebrow at Sophie. "And to think they are all saying you're a natural with the kids at work," he said tartly.

"Yes well." Sophie coughed. "It's a learning curve. So, anyway, follow me to the bedroom."

Cal followed her with a derisive snort. "That's exactly what Mauro said to me," he said mournfully as she closed the door behind her. "So come on then, tell me what this is all about. Although why you couldn't tell me on the phone, I don't know."

"Because your cell phone signal wasn't very good and I didn't want to have to shout out what this was all about in case walls have ears, if you know what I mean."

"I don't," Cal said sharply. "So speak English. You're being annoying."

"I know," Sophie said. "I'm sorry. I had to call you over because of your language skills. I had to think for a moment if Spanish was one of them, but then I remembered in your interview when you told me you'd been traveling all around the world and that you'd worked in Barcelona for a year for a law firm and spoke fluent Spanish."

Cal pursed his lips and looked out the window. "Yes, I do recollect that," he said, carefully.

"Well, Louis Gregory is in Lima, so I need you to call and speak Spanish to whoever picks up the phone so we can get hold of him, okay?"

Cal bit his lip. "And you don't speak Spanish at all?" he asked.

"Nope," Sophie reaffirmed with a nod, her hands on her hips. "You know me!"

"So you'd have no idea what the Spanish person or indeed I was saying, for example?" he doubled-checked, crossing his arms over his lucky shag shirt, a pale blue one shot through with subtle silver pinstripes.

"Not a sausage," Sophie said, honestly.

"Okay, I'll do it," Cal said. He took the piece of paper with the number on it from Sophie, sat on the edge of the bed, and looked at it.

"This is important, isn't it?" he said, with an edge of reluctance.

"Just a bit!" Sophie said, laughing nervously. "Like the lives of three people depend on its outcome!" She put a hand on his shoulder. "That's why I really do appreciate you coming over, Cal. You're totally saving my life here, even if you are pretending to be all flippant about it. You really are wonderful, you know."

Cal nodded. "I'm sorry, Sophie," he said, unable to look at her. "I lied on my CV. I lied in the interview. I didn't go around the world. I went skiing in Aspen for two weeks once, and I didn't work for a year in Barcelona for a law firm. I stayed there for a month with an old boyfriend and worked in an English bar until we broke up. I can't speak fluent Spanish. I can barely speak tourist Spanish. I can't actually speak fluent anything. When you ask me to tell you what to say to overseas clients, I look it up on the Internet. There's this amazing site that gives you pronunciations and everything." He dropped his head and braced himself, although he didn't know why. He should have known by now that she was terrible at losing her temper-doing so required far too much abandon.

Sophie just stared at him. She didn't know what to be more cross about, the fact that he'd lied his way through his job interview, the fact that she had fallen for it, or the fact that he was about as much use to her now in practical terms as he was as a lover. And then she remembered, at least he was here. He had come, and he had told her the truth when it mattered.

"Bastard," she said, but in general rather than directed straight at Cal. "Look, you must remember some basic phrases if you lived there for a month, and we did that Spanish fashion label a couple of months back. You must remember something from then?"

Cal shrugged. "I guess so," he said uncertainly before catching Sophie's look of anxiety. "Oh, what the hell? Okay, I'll do it."

"Well, go on then," Sophie said, nodding at the phone, as unaware that she was twisting her fingers as she watched him.

"But what's the time difference?" he said. "There might not be anybody there."

Sophie sighed and sat down on the edge of her bed beside him. "I don't know," she said. "I forgot to look that bit up. It's five hours to New York, isn't it, and it's at least as far away as that." She looked at her watch. "So assuming it's about the same, it's just gone eleven now, so it's either four o'clock in the afternoon there or...six o'clock in the morning. I think it's six o'clock in the morning. Maybe earlier...." Sophie sighed. "There'll be no one there, will there? I was really psyched up for this too."

Cal looked at her profile, her chin dropping to her chest. "What the hell, let's do it now anyway. You never know, we might be lucky," he said. He dialed the number, and they waited. The passing seconds seemed to stretch on for hours.

"Ah, hello...Um, Buenos dias I mean." There was a pause, during which Cal nodded at Sophie and winked. "Arrepentido about the, er-hora. It's an emergency a...urgencia?" Sophie gave him a worried look. His Spanish sounded all made up to her, and the faint voice of the person on the other end of the line sounded less than thrilled to be talking to Cal at six o'clock in the morning. But he pressed on, smiling as he spoke, as if his charm might somehow work long-distance too. "Me llamo Cal, and I am trying to speak, um, hablar? To Louis Gregory. Louis Gregory, por favor? Urgencia." Sophie heard the faint rattle of a voice on the other end of the line. "S...S...S. Gracias!"

"What are they saying?" she whispered.

"Not the foggiest," Cal said happily. "But hopefully they've gone to get someone who can speak English. I think they got the emergency bit," he said proudly. "I learned that after my boyfriend broke his ankle coming off a moped and I had to call an ambulance." Cal listened intently to the echoes on the line. "If I'm not very much mistaken, somebody in Lima likes listening to Justin Timberlake in the small hours of the morning-and who can blame them?"

They waited for what seemed like an age, and then Cal looked at Sophie as he heard the clatter of a receiver being picked up.

"Oh, hello," he said after a pause. "Right then, hang on a moment." He held out the receiver to Sophie, who stared at it in horror.

"But, Cal, I can't speak Spanish," she said.

"You don't have to," Cal said. "It's him. It's Louis Gregory."

"So," Cal said urgently, as Sophie put the phone down. "What did he say, how'd he react, did he cry?"

Sophie shook her head and replayed the conversation she had just had, because it had happened so quickly she wasn't exactly sure if she understood it.

"Listen, babe, do you know what time it is? You've woken the whole place up! Look, before you say anything, I meant to call you, but I've just been up to my eyes in it..." This had thrown Sophie. She had not expected Louis to be expecting a call from another Englishwoman whose male secretary put the call through with the world's worst Spanish in the early hours of the morning-or indeed another English-speaking woman at any time, full stop. She'd thought that perhaps Cal had made a mistake and it wasn't Louis at all.

"This is Louis Gregory, right? Formally of St. Ives, Cornwall?" There'd been a short silence, and Sophie almost physically felt Louis tense up.

"Yes?" he'd said, and he laughed, probably a nervous reaction Sophie decided in retrospect, but one that had made her feel even more nervous.

"Hello, it's Sophie, Sophie Mills? Do you remember me?" There'd been an echo on the line, and after Sophie had finished each word, she'd heard it repeated in her ear, her voice sounding thin and girlish and not at all like a voice delivering serious news. "Sophie Mills, I was at your wedding. Carrie's friend. Carrie Stiles's friend-I was a friend of your wife." The echo had continued for another beat, and suddenly Sophie had been able to sense the change in him, thousands of miles away. She could picture him sitting up a little straighter, the smile fading from his face as moment by moment he realized what her call meant. It meant something bad had happened.

"Where are the girls, are they hurt? Is one of them hurt? What's happened?" he'd said quickly, and Sophie had found herself stumbling to reassure him-this absentee father and wife leaver whom neither girl seemed to know existed-that both of his children were okay.

"They're okay, they're here with me," she'd said quickly. "They are not hurt." She had heard him breathe out a sigh and almost felt it in the shell of her ear.

He'd taken a deep breath. "What's happened, Sophie?" he had asked, but Sophie somehow had known the question was a formality. Somehow, she'd realized that he already knew the answer, so she'd just told him outright.

"Carrie is dead," she'd said.

"Carrie is dead," the line had echoed, and Sophie had breathed in sharply, as if she was hearing the news for the first time too. But then her fledgling intuition had faltered. She had been bracing herself for an emotional outburst, questions, tears even. But there had been nothing-just silence. Sophie had remembered how she'd first reacted when she'd first heard, how she still felt-as if her heart was a thousand miles away-so she'd gone on filling the void with details. "It was a car accident, almost seven months ago." Still Louis had said nothing. "She was killed outright. The girls went to live with her mother and then Mrs. Stiles couldn't cope and called in Social Services about a month ago. They were sorting out the house and found a will. I was in the will, as guardian. So the girls came here." She had taken a breath. "Social Services have been looking for you for the last month, but they had all the red tape to get through, so I hired a private detective to find you and she did." This time it had been Sophie's nervous, inappropriate laughter that had echoed on a second's delay in her ears. "Look, Louis, I know you haven't seen them in a long time, maybe you don't want to but-"

"I'll be on the next flight I can get on," he said out of the silence.

Sophie had been taken aback by the sound of his voice, hardened with urgency.

"Oh, right, okay then," she'd said slowly, supposing that she had the result she wanted. "Let me just give you some details..."

She'd heard Louis scrabbling for a pen as he took down her address and number.

"Thank you for everything you've done," he'd said. "But I'm coming to get them, now."

"Do you know when-" The dial tone had buzzed in Sophie's ear. "We can expect you?" She'd finished the sentence into thin air.

Sophie had learned very little about Louis from that phone call. He had hardly reacted to the news that the mother of his children was dead, and he had just more or less assumed that he could waltz back into the girls' lives after three years away and take them off to God knows where to God knows what kind of life without so much as a by-your-leave. She experienced yet another unfamiliar sensation, a sharp protective pang in her gut, followed by a surge of unexpected fierceness. She found herself thinking, Over my dead body, and then she smiled to herself as she realized just how apt and inappropriate that phrase was.

She looked at a bemused Cal. "He says," she told him, "he's coming. Not big on details like how or when, but he's coming apparently."

Cal rested his lightly stubbled chin in the palm of his hand. "And-what's he like?"

Sophie shrugged again and felt a worm of worry begin to insinuate its way into her chest as she contemplated all the possible consequences of the chain of events she had just set in motion. She bit her lip and looked at Cal. "I don't know," she said. "I just don't know."

Eleven.

The girls were delighted to see their grandmother. Izzy twirled and pranced around the small front room of Mrs. Stiles's new ground-floor apartment, bumping happily into the crowd of old furniture, and Bella, although less showy than her sister, did quite a lot of discreet toe pointing and heel lifting in a bid to show off her new shoes to their maximum advantage. Unfortunately, in the midst of Izzy's balletic craziness, only Sophie, a fellow toe pointer, noticed, so she bent down and whispered into Bella's ear. "Your shoes look fabulous." Which made Bella smile.

"Calm down, Izzy!" Mrs. Stiles ordered as Izzy threw her arms around her legs and buried her face in her skirt, declaring, "I love to see you, Grandma!" at the top of her voice.

"I love to see you too, darling," Mrs. Stiles said, looking flustered but pleased by the sign of affection. "But I'd also love to keep my knees in one piece. This arthritis-it'll be the death of me if the blood pressure doesn't get me first," she said, patting Izzy on the head.

"Or the cancer," Bella reminded her.

"Oh yes, well, you're right. It might be cancer, bowel probably, I've got terrible constipation," Mrs. Stiles said matter-of-factly, and Sophie realized that the children must have discussed the exact nature of Mrs. Stiles's demise quite often during their stay with her, which she found rather disturbing. A philandering father or a morbid grandmother-there wasn't much of a choice when it came to close relatives.

"Oh, you'll outlive us all," Sophie said with forced joviality.

"I sincerely hope not," Mrs. Stiles said bleakly. Her face took a downward tumble, as if somebody had just switched the gravity back on, and Sophie realized exactly what she had just said.

"I'm sorry, I only meant..." She sighed. "Oh, look, I don't know what I meant," she said with a vague gesture to back her up. "I'm sorry."

Mrs. Stiles ignored her. "Do you two girls want some lemon barley and a French fancy?" she said. The girls nodded, and Sophie followed Mrs. Stiles into the small kitchen and stood in the doorway watching Bella and Izzy lean up against the window of the living room and breathe hard against the glass, drawing faces in the mist before it faded, and then, flinging open the patio doors, they ran out onto the small shared courtyard and began marching around the central bird bath with apparently motiveless enthusiasm.

"I've just cleaned those windows," Mrs. Stiles said to Sophie, pressing her lips together. It wasn't that she didn't want the girls here, Sophie decided, it was rather that she didn't like them turning up unexpectedly. She didn't like any unannounced pebble rippling the calm surface of her routine. Sophie didn't blame her; she supposed that two sudden if minor strokes and the death of your adult daughter would make you cling to the belief that every tomorrow was much better off being exactly the same as yesterday, because at least then you knew where you stood. This was why it was a shame really that Sophie was about to throw a bloody great big brick into her pond, so to speak.

Once again Sophie had cause to reflect on the fact that she had been so keen to find Louis, so certain that his arrival would be the answer to everyone's problems-mainly her own-that she hadn't stopped to consider the implications of him turning up for anyone else. Not for Mrs. Stiles, not for Tess Andrew, and not for the girls. However, Louis was coming now, and there was nothing she could do to stop that, so she had to tell her, and if there was one thing that Sophie had learned over the last few days, it was that if you had to tell somebody something she didn't want to hear, there was no way to dress it up.

"Louis is coming back to London. He's coming to see the girls," she said. Mrs. Stiles poured water into the two cups of lemon barley she had prepared and set the jug down on the counter before turning to look at Sophie.

"They found him then," she said. "I had hoped they wouldn't; I told that Tess not to bother. She more or less told me it would take months. I'd hoped for the girls' sake that she was right."

Sophie didn't know how to react to that piece of information, so she said nothing but watched Mrs. Stiles shake her head and twist her swollen, knotted fingers, her left side slow and heavy.

"Well, now he'll be happy, won't he?" she said bitterly. "Now he'll get everything his own way, won't he? My daughter's dead, out of the way for good, and he can come waltzing in like some kind of hero and drag them off to God knows what kind of life." She shot Sophie a red-hot look. "I certainly won't ever see them again, once he's got them. He won't let me."

Sophie tucked her loose hair back behind her ear and chewed her lip for a moment. She had to be straight with her. "It wasn't Tess that found him," she said. "It was me, sort of. I spoke to him earlier today." Sophie remembered the sense of unease the conversation had left her with. "He sounded really worried about the girls. He said he'd come straightaway." But her uncertainty sounded in her voice, and Mrs. Stiles looked skeptical. "Look, I can't suddenly have two children, Mrs. Stiles. As much as I...like the girls, none of us can go on the way we are. It's not fair to them or me, and what's the alternative? I thought that this was what Carrie would want."

Mrs. Stiles looked over Sophie's shoulder and out the window to where the girls continued to circle, the winter sun blanching all the color out of her skin.

"Carrie wanted you," she told Sophie pointedly. "That's why your name was in her will. Besides, you hardly knew her at all when she died-how would you know what she would want now? Well, I'll tell you what she didn't want. She didn't want a husband who ran out on her and her children at the first sign of trouble. And she wouldn't want him taking those two girls, she wouldn't." Mrs. Stiles narrowed her eyes. "Oh, he might play at being a dad for a while-but for how long? How long before the novelty wears off and he's bored again? What will happen to them then?" She took a deep, shuddering breath. "I just wish, I just wish I was twenty years younger and I could look after them myself. If I could, I'd fight tooth and nail to keep them from him, to do something for Carrie at last. To be able to help her. She would never let me help her, she never wanted it. Sometimes it felt like she hated me, but I don't know why, Sophie, I don't...Because I loved that child so much. She was my life."

Sophie was appalled to see a tear track its way through the powdery surface of Mrs. Stiles's skin. She reached out a hand and touched the older woman's thin shoulder.

"I'm all right," Mrs. Stiles said, taking a step away. She reached for the kettle with her right hand and filled it at the tap.

"Look," Sophie said. "Tess won't let him just walk off with them. I won't let him, I promise you. He can't anyway. There's all sort of orders and things protecting them."

Sophie looked toward the living room as the girls marched in through the double doors, around the ancient coffee table, and back out again. "They don't even know he's coming yet." She lowered her voice. "Do they even know who he is?"

Mrs. Stiles put two tea bags in a pot and watched the boiling kettle.

"All they know is that he had never been there for them, not even when they needed him the most," she said, picking the kettle up the moment it boiled and filling the pot to the brim. "Carrie would never have a bad word said against him, but I told her-they should know. They should know what kind of man he is."

Sophie hesitated for a moment before asking Mrs. Stiles the question she'd really come to ask. "Did Carrie tell you straightaway that Louis had left her? Because, well...I didn't know."

Mrs. Stiles looked sharply at her. "She never told you?"

Sophie shook her head.

"No," Mrs. Stiles continued. "She didn't even tell me after the christening. I daresay she never would have told me at all if it had been up to her. But she started having money trouble. I know she didn't want to ask me for help, but she had no choice. She needed some money to keep going with the mortgage payments until she could start this new full-time job she'd got. Of course I asked what Louis was doing to get them out of trouble, and that's when it came out. He'd been gone nearly a year before she told me."

Mrs. Stiles gazed into the distance as she reflected on the memory. "When she was a little girl, the age of those two out there, we were such good friends. So happy, you know. I wish...I wish I hadn't let everything that happened between me and her father come between me and her. After he went, I was so hurt, so angry. Not just at him but at everything. We were never that close again. I knew I was pushing her away, but I couldn't seem to stop myself. I always thought there'd be time to make things right one day. I was wrong. And now these two will be off with Louis and I won't have any time with them either."

Sophie reached out and squeezed Mrs. Stiles's thin arm. "Please," she said. "Try not to worry. Look, I'll pop out the front now and call Tess. Once I've told her, she'll know what to do, okay?"

"Don't be long," Mrs. Stiles said stiffly, pouring milk into a jug. "Your tea will stew."

For some reason, Sophie had assumed that social workers should be on call seven days a week, but it appeared that Tess was not available on a Saturday afternoon after all. Her cell phone was switched off, and her work number rang off the hook. Unable to produce anything to reassure both Mrs. Stiles and herself, Sophie sighed. Noticing her breath mist in the cold air, she took a surreptitious look left and right and reached for the packet of Marlboro Lights she had managed to buy on yesterday's shopping trip at the same time as buying the girls a king-size Snickers bar each and smoked it quickly, stubbing out the butt under the toe of her shoe and bending to scoop it up, slipping it into her pocket and taking a few more deep breaths of cold air before she went back in. Her temples throbbed as she tried to work out all the implications of what might happen next, and she felt a kind of hollow worry gnawing at her from the inside out.

Sophie had the strangest sensation that she had felt exactly like this once before, standing in the cold watching the heat of breath cool in the air, letting the tips of toes freeze rather than move her body on to the next moment and the moment after that, when things would never be the same again. It was a sense of dej vu that was as strong and as jolting as the memory caused by a smell or a photo.

It didn't take long to place the memory. It had been at her father's autumn funeral. Sophie standing in her best black shoes by the little pile of flowers the crematorium had arranged for him in one corner of the courtyard. Friends and family had milled there for a while, shaking hands and avoiding eye contact, not really knowing what to say to one another until the modest crowd had drifted back toward the cars in preparation for the wake. That empty, worrying sensation had come to her just before Sophie finally realized what had happened. She had been standing beside a wreath of flowers with a card that read "To Dad, miss you so much" when abruptly the pain, the shock, and the horrific knowledge that loving her dad wouldn't mean anything ever again had engulfed her.

She had been unable to move. She had stood watching everybody else leave. After a few seconds, Carrie had noticed Sophie was not among the group and had come back to fetch her. "Come on," she'd said, her cheeks rosy in the cold. "It's freezing."

"He's gone," Sophie said, staring at Carrie. "Nothing's ever going to be the same now."

"That's not true," Carrie said, hooking her arm through Sophie's. "We'll stay the same, you and me. We will always stay the same, I promise. Always. Forever. Whatever. Right?"

So Sophie recognized the way she was feeling at that moment. She knew it was exactly the same way she had been feeling on the day she had said good-bye to her dad just before the pain became too much and the walls came down between her and the hurt. And Sophie had known at last that Carrie had been wrong and she had been right.

Nothing ever stays the same.

When Sophie finally went back inside, she was entirely unprepared for what she saw, but at least it lifted her from the complicated coil of her thoughts.

Actually, it wasn't so much what she saw, which was Mrs. Stiles sitting on the sofa flanked by the two girls, their respective heads leaning sweetly on each of her shoulders as the ensemble rocked from side to side. It was what she heard. The old lady and two small girls were singing "Motorcycle Emptiness" by the Manic Street Preachers as if it were some kind of raucous lullaby, with Bella and Izzy filling in for the thunderous guitar solo with enthusiastic "Nee, nee, nee-nee neeeows."

Certainly Sophie thought she would never live to see the day that Mrs. Stiles sang hardcore political Welsh rock, although the girls' grandmother did change some of the more controversial lyrics for propriety's sake. Still, as unorthodox as the rendition was, it sparked an unexpectedly vivid memory, which came thundering back to Sophie just as the girl's version of the guitar riff suddenly became real again in her ears.

It was summer. She and Carrie were more or less eighteen. Still so close that they felt they would always mean as much to each other as they did on that day, that it would be impossible for them to drift apart. It had been just a few weeks before Carrie was due to leave for university, and it would be another week or so before Sophie would get her entry-level job at McCarthy Hughes. In reality they were just about to take their first steps in completely opposite directions.

They were in the park, Sophie with her brand-new portable CD player that weighed ton. They'd just bought the new Manic Street Preachers CD, and they were sitting on the grass listening to it, turning up the volume as loud as it would go-which wasn't very loud. Dressed entirely in black, they looked especially cross and sullen as they listened because that seemed the most appropriate expression for listening to the Manic Street Preachers, who were, it seemed, quite cross and sullen about most things. But when "Motorcycle Emptiness" came on, Sophie had been unable to stop herself from humming along under her breath and tapping her bare toes against the rough grass in time to the catchy tune.