My sixteen-year-old walked down a crowded beach to the ice cream stand and never came back. Eight years later, six hundred miles away, the wind lifted the hem of a stranger’s faded turquoise cover-up and I saw my mother’s crooked yellow sun stitched over the tear.
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.
