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well Mum didn’t live to see it.”
    Lily said, “It’s hard to believe, all this happened to you and I didn’t even know about it.”
    “Or about your mom,” Gary said.“I’m glad I spoke to my own family, my mother. I’m looking forward to seeing her real soon.”
    Amanda poured him more tea. “When will they be sending you home?”
    “A couple more days. I hear flights out of the civilian airports are problematic.”
    “Tell me about it. Heathrow is nothing but flooded runways and power-outs.”
    “I’m pretty sure I’ll blag a seat on a military flight soon enough.”
    “You’re not in the military, though?”
    “No, but I do a lot of work with them. I’m a climate scientist.” When he was taken he had been fresh out of a NASA institution called the Goddard Institute for Space Studies. “That’s why I was in Spain. It’s a climate-change hot spot. The interior is desiccating, turning into kind of like North Africa—or it was. All that rain wasn’t in the old models and I’ve not caught up with the latest data. I was on my way to run some ground-truth studies of geosat observations on sand-dune formations outside Madrid, when, wham, a car pulled off the road in front of me.”
    “I can’t imagine how that must have felt.”
    Gary said, “The first thing I thought was, how am I going to finish my job?”
    Lily remembered she had felt much the same about her own abduction. It wasn’t fear that struck her at first, more irritation at being plucked out of her life, her own concerns—that and some residual shock from the Chinook crash, even though she, the crew and the passengers had all walked away from it. At first she had been sure she would be released in two weeks, or three, or four. It was some time after that that the long reality of her imprisonment had cut into her consciousness, and other, stronger reactions had started to take over. Looking back, she wondered if she would have stayed sane if she had known from the start it was going to be all of five years before she was free again.
    Amanda was watching her silently.
    “Sorry,” Lily said. “Woolgathering.”
    “There’s things we need to talk about, Lil,” Amanda said awkwardly. “The will, for one thing.”
    “Oh.” Lily hadn’t got that far, in the rather shocked half-hour since they’d arrived.
    Gary stood, setting down his cup. “You know, you two need time.”
    “You don’t have to go.”
    He smiled. He had a broad face that could be prone to fat, a mouth that smiled easily, a freckled forehead under a receding tangle of red-brown hair. Now he covered Lily’s hand with his. “Babe, you just had some seriously bad news. Look, I’ll be fine, I’ll take a walk. It’s for the best.”
    Amanda also stood. “It’s good of you, though I feel like a dreadful hostess. If you want to walk, just head down to the Fulham Road—that way.” She pointed. “You’ll reach the High Street and then the river, near Putney Bridge. There are parks, a riverside path.”
    “Sounds good to me. I’ll feed the ducks. And I’ll be back here in, what, a couple of hours?”
    “You’ll get soaked,” Lily said.
    “Not if the pubs are open. Um, can you loan me an umbrella?”
    Amanda showed him out.

    The sisters sat on the tall kitchen stools, sharing a box of tissues, talking of their mother, the house, Amanda’s kids, and how Amanda hadn’t been able to get her mother buried close by; in London even the cemeteries were overcrowded.
    “Mum left everything to the two of us equally. After she died it was all held up for a year; there was no news if you were alive or dead. Eventually the lawyers agreed to execute the will and release Mum’s estate. We got the keys and sold up and moved in. I mean, if we hadn’t I couldn’t have afforded to pay for the upkeep of this place, the recovery after the flood damage and whatnot. That bastard Jerry is still paying maintenance for the kids, but the bare minimum, it wouldn’t have helped