‘Mom, I took you to Tavern on the Green for dinner to make it up to you. We went to the freaking Rockefeller Center to see the tree! What more do you want from me?’

  ‘And then’ – Carolyn continued as if Sam hadn’t spoken – ‘she arrives back in town not even a fortnight later and I have to hear that she’s staying in the Bennford Inn, of all places, from Lydia Thomas, and good God, Samantha, you know what she’s like. Didn’t you know? she asked me, absolutely thrilled she was the one to tell me.’

  ‘How did she hear I was in town? I literally just arrived yesterday; I’ve barely been outside the Inn.’

  ‘Her niece is the assistant manager here,’ Carolyn said with a dismissive wave. ‘And that’s hardly the point, is it?’

  ‘Mom, I—’

  ‘I don’t want to hear any more excuses. Pack your bags. You’re coming home with me.’

  Sam’s childhood was a lonely one, she would say in interviews. Her parents had been unsure if they even wanted kids; their careers were time-consuming, their lives in the city full of dinner parties and gallery openings, tickets for this play and invites to that exhibition. Sam had been the result of a missed pill, and that was how she’d always been made to feel – like a mistake. Not the son her father wanted, nor the pliant, malleable doll her mother would have shaped in her own image. With the help of guided visualizations to heal her inner child (which she’d insisted were readily available on Shakti so her girls could have access to the same healing she had), Sam had made peace with her past but still, she found herself reciting mantras as she drove to her mother’s house – ‘I am powerful. I am a Child of the Universe. I am worthy of love and respect’ – and by the time she parked behind her mother’s BMW, her damp palms were slipping on the steering wheel. She rolled down the window, staring up at her childhood home.

  ‘Fuck,’ Sam muttered under her breath. It was eerie, how similar the houses were. Had no one else in town noticed her former best friend playing Single White Female? Surely people had thought it odd when the Taylors had built a copy-cat mansion of their own?

  ‘Samantha,’ her mother said, turning at the front door. ‘It’s seventeen degrees out this evening and I’m not as young as I once was. I’d rather not get frostbite waiting for you, if you don’t mind.’

  She hurried to catch up to Carolyn. There were more photos hung on the chinoiserie tea paper from the hall to the living room: her parents’ wedding and their honeymoon in Paris, smiling in front of the Eiffel Tower. Another, more formal picture from their thirtieth wedding anniversary, sitting on a sofa, their knees touching. They’d thrown a large party that night, erecting a marquee in the garden, caterers hired to serve Dom Pérignon in coupe glasses. Sam wasn’t invited. ‘Why must you always put it that way? You weren’t available,’ her mother would complain. Sam was in rehab at the time, going cold turkey in a facility in upstate New York, and the day of her parents’ anniversary clashed with a family therapy session. It had been easy to reschedule – ‘No harm done, darling!’ her mother trilled on the phone – but that wasn’t the point, Sam wanted to say. She needed them to show up for her. And once again, they had not.

  The living room was decorated in shades of blue, the bespoke sofa and spoon-back chairs covered in a powder silk, and Sam sat, almost afraid to move – she hadn’t been allowed in this room as a child and she was still nervous she would spill her tea on the rug, leave a ring mark on the walnut coffee table. She spotted a small photo in a silver frame, tucked behind a cut-crystal vase filled with calla lilies. It was one of her, this time, a small child blowing out candles, and next to her, staring at the red velvet cake in awe, was Lisa. This was her earliest childhood memory, her fourth birthday party – the lilac dress with white stars her mother had yanked roughly over her head, the staff at the local Chuck E. Cheese singing ‘Happy Birthday’ to her before clearing the table when she’d gone to use the restroom. There’d been another girl sitting in her place when she had returned, another cake. ‘My first Bennford birthday,’ she said, turning the frame around and showing it to Carolyn.

  Her mother glanced at it, saying, ‘No, that was in the city. We brought you to the Plaza, remember? Like Eloise.’

  Sam looked at it again. ‘Oh yeah, you’re right,’ she said, putting the frame back down. ‘She lives close by; did you know that?’ Sam checked her phone to see if her manager had emailed before tucking it into her bag. ‘Lisa, I mean. Their house is the exact same as yours; it’s so weird. Have you seen it?’ Her mother had been about to pour tea into Sam’s cup but she placed the pot down on the mirrored tray again.

  ‘I have,’ she said carefully. ‘Joshua came to me when they were building and I—’ She stopped herself. ‘I didn’t know you were back in touch with Lisa.’

  ‘I’m not. We haven’t spoken since high school, you know that. God. It was tough seeing her today. I don’t know what I hoped would happen but …’ Sam blinked away tears. ‘Anyway. I’ll figure it out.’ She tried to smile. ‘Oh, macarons! Are they vegan?’ She reached down to take one and her mother grabbed her wrist. Carolyn’s skin was ice-cold and her grip was surprisingly firm for a woman of her age.

  ‘Don’t start all that again,’ she said. ‘They’ve had enough trouble. Just let them alone, this time.’

  Sam jerked her hand away, throwing the macaron back on the platter. ‘You don’t know anything about it, Mom. So why are you jumping to the conclusion that I’m the one in the wrong?’

  It wounded her, how her parents always assumed the worst of her. Sam had made mistakes in the past, she was aware of that. She had hurt people when she was at the height of her addiction; she’d been unreliable, untrustworthy. She’d lied, she had stolen from friends and colleagues, she had done things that still made her uneasy to think about. Rooms she had woken up in, men she should never have touched. Limping home with unexplained bruises and vomit pooling at the back of her throat, trying to forget the night before. Her face pushed into a pillow that smelled of another woman’s perfume, the way she had cried as a man called her a dirty whore and hadn’t stopped to check if she was OK. Those men never stopped. Calling a car on the magazine’s account before phoning in sick, hiding in her apartment for the rest of the day, popping diazepam to soothe the fear licking its tongue up her spine. She’d promise herself that tomorrow would be different, but after every tomorrow turned out to be the same, she couldn’t even believe her own lies any more. She had done the work, she had recovered. Yet whenever she was back in Bennford, she could feel the old Sam pulsing beneath her skin. It was her mother’s fault, she thought. It had always been Carolyn who knew where the stitches lay, how easily she could unpick the seams of this new identity Sam had made for herself. Carolyn was the one to blame.

  ‘Joshua and Lisa could have been kinder to you when you were teenagers. I’m aware of that,’ her mother said. ‘But they’re happy now. They’ve moved on. You need to do the same.’

  ‘That’s easy for you to say.’ Sam got to her feet, her fingers itching to upend the Ottoman, knock over the teacups and saucers and those antique silver spoons her mother was so precious about. She probably preferred those fucking spoons to her own daughter; she certainly took better care of them. ‘Why can’t you ever take my side?’

  ‘For goodness’ sake, this isn’t about “sides”. You’re not a child.’

  ‘Just shut up and leave me alone,’ Sam screamed, sounding exactly like the child her mother said she wasn’t supposed to be any more. She stormed out of the room and slammed the door behind her.

  She stood there, trying to catch her breath, when she heard her mother say clearly, ‘And of course they’re not vegan. They’re basically meringues.’

  Sam had somehow imagined her bedroom would look the same as when she’d left it at eighteen. Padded bras on the floor, her Steve Madden slides kicked under the bed. It would smell of CK One and there would be nail polish scattered on her vanity table, a Fiona Apple CD and a stack of magazines on the nightstand. A time capsule, proof that she had existed and had a life here once. But her mother had other ideas, she could see. Carolyn had stripped the room bare, paving the floor with tiles and placing an old lamp she’d never liked on a vintage chest of drawers. There was a reupholstered Queen Anne chair, a pearl-and-bone inlay mirror, and a black-and-white photograph of a girl in a frilled dress smoking a cigarette hung by the lead-framed window. Of course her mother would not have kept it as a shrine to her, as if she’d died tragically and they couldn’t bear to move a single tube of mascara. Carolyn wasn’t exactly the sentimental type; even if Sam had died – and she could have, she thought fiercely, there were far too many times when she was close to death, stepping unsteadily into hot baths while she was wasted and the temptation to slip beneath the water was so great – her mother would have seized the opportunity to redecorate anyway.

  She threw her bag at the foot of the bed and flopped on to the mattress, screaming her frustration into the pillow. She kicked her boots off and pulled the sweater over her head, lying there in her leggings and bra as she tried to catch her breath. She should phone Diane, set up an emergency Zoom session. Her therapist understood that these neural pathways were so deeply ingrained, it was all too easy to fall back into old patterns of behaviour. The brain will always take the path of least resistance, Diane would remind her. Old habits die hard. She could go on Instagram, too; she hadn’t done a #SamShares in days and she knew, as upsetting as the confrontation with her mother had been, it might be helpful for her girls. They would identify with this struggle; they were young enough to appreciate how tempting it was to regress when you returned to your childhood home. This is the work, she would say, watching as the comments popped up on screen. Hi from Brazil! We love you, Sam! She always shared her pain in the hope it would ease theirs.

  She touched the side of the bed, running her hand up and down, and she froze when her finger snagged on a tiny indentation in the wood. The bed board was different, a quilted jacquard in the same pattern as the armchair, but had her mother kept the old frame? She rolled off and tried to look underneath but it was too dark to see. She dug into her handbag until she found her phone, using the torch app as she scooted her body under. There was a reason why an image of a girl hiding under her bed was used for the Willing Silence book cover, and then again for the movie poster. Sam did this whenever her parents fought, arguing over the hours Carolyn worked, the magazine article her new practice had featured in – The boys in the office had to show me. Do you know how that makes me look? – her father had shouted that day, furious. She still hid under the bed when she was a teenager and she heard her mother’s footsteps tapping down the hall. ‘She’s not here,’ Carolyn would say when she found her daughter’s room empty. ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do with that girl.’ Snippets of her parents’ conversation floating through the floorboards: it’s not natural and they were always too close. Sam would put on her headphones, blaring Alanis on her Discman, and she’d scribble notes on the underside of the bed frame in black marker. Parents fighting again, 10/16/1993 on one side, I had a panic attack today, Dad told me to go to my room and have my ‘little freak-out’ there, 07/27/1995 on the other. No one knew about this hiding place except Lisa. Sam had shown her one day after school, gesturing at the other girl to follow as she disappeared under the bed. Lisa holding up the torch to examine the messages written on the wood, reading aloud. ‘I think my father hates me.’ She had sighed, reaching out to hold Sam’s hand. ‘It doesn’t matter if he does,’ she’d said. ‘Because I love you. I will love you forever.’

  Now, as Sam hid under her bed again, she ran her fingers across the ragged wood, tracing the veins of her girlhood pain. Her phone buzzed – an email from Jane, the subject line screaming URGENT!!!!!! – and as she tried to climb out, her foot hit against something solid. She knelt on the rug and pulled it out, finding a large wooden box with geometric stencilling inlaid around the edges. It was beautiful, a mother-of-pearl clasp at the closure and a blue velvet interior, and she gasped in delight when she opened it. Carolyn had phoned her when Sam first moved to the city, saying a package had arrived from Utah and what did Sam expect her to do with this stuff? Burn it, Sam had said. What did she want with her memories now? She would make new ones, better ones. But her mother had kept everything. There were ticket stubs for the movie theatre, Polaroids of her and Lisa in the knee-high socks they’d worn after Clueless was released, their make-up turning bone-white under a camera flash. Tickets from a No Doubt concert in Hartford, dozens of fading Valentine’s Day cards. There were her old diaries, too, held together with flimsy locks that she broke easily now, bubble writing on the front page demanding that the intruder KEEP OUT! She flipped through one, laughing at how intense she had been. I can’t believe Lisa told Becky about my crush on MK!!!! she’d written in March 1997. Who was MK? she wondered. She couldn’t remember having a crush on someone with those initials. I will never forgive her for this, as long as I live. And then she pretended not to know what I was talking about when I said it to her! AS IF!! I swear, this is IT for us. If she comes over after school, I’m gonna tell her that. She and Becky can have each other!!! The diary entry went on for pages, with precise details of how exactly Sam planned to punish Lisa for this transgression. It had clearly been important at the time and yet now she had no memory of this particular fight, reaching into the recesses of her brain and finding nothing. At the bottom of the box, there was a stack of letters. She stiffened when she saw them, the Comic Sans font, the computer ink smudged in parts.

  I miss you so much, Mouse. Do you miss me too? It’s so boring here. Have you made any new friends yet?

  She scanned through the pages quickly. They were from Lisa, writing while Sam was at the school in Utah, and each one was signed off in the same way – I will love you forever, Mouse. That had been Lisa’s family nickname when she was a kid because she was so shy, and when Sam had first heard it, she’d declared, If you’re a mouse, then I’m a mouse too. While she was writing Chaste, she’d often thought about what it felt like to be best friends with Lisa. The almost obsessive affection they’d shared as girls, the constant urge to remind the other how loved they were, how much they needed one another. The night her father died, Sam had stared at her phone, wondering who to call. And there had been no one she wanted to talk to except for Lisa; no one else would understand how complicated her pain was, how she didn’t know how to grieve the loss of someone she never really had in the first place. She’d cried then, not just for her dad, but for Lisa too.

  Her phone rang. ‘Hey,’ Sam answered, one of the letters still clutched in her hand. She didn’t want to let them go; it was as if she could still feel her friend’s energy coming through the pages.

  ‘Hey,’ Jane shouted. The background was busy, voices yelling, the insistent beat of an old-school Prince track pulsating against the walls. ‘Did you get my email? I just wanted to check in. See how things are going.’

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘Out for dinner with Maddy and her people.’ Maddy Morgan was one of Jane’s other clients, a born-again Christian cornering the self-care market for Gen-Z women of faith. Her first book, Blessed, was an instant bestseller and while Sam wanted to be supportive – strong women uplift other women, she always told her girls – she’d lost a couple of opportunities to Maddy recently and it stung. ‘They couldn’t have a panel full of white women,’ Jane had explained, ‘it would have been a Twitter shit storm,’ and Sam had smiled, pretending she wasn’t paranoid that her manager was shifting more of her attention to the younger woman. Jane liked her, she knew, but Jane would always like her 15 per cent more, no matter where it was coming from.

  ‘Have you spoken to L—’

  ‘Yes,’ Sam cut across her. ‘I went over there today. Oh God, Jane, she looked so thin. I’m worried about her.’

  ‘Has she said what she wants? Is she looking for money, a retraction, what?’

  ‘I’m not sure. We didn’t really get into that.’ Sam could sense her manager’s impatience so she rushed on, ‘But you’ll never believe what I found! It’s this box full of letters Lisa wrote me when I was in Utah. There are dozens of them. Listen to this.’ She smoothed the page out and began to read aloud. ‘“Life is so boring right now, Mouse” – we called each other Mouse. Just a stupid nickname but … sorry, I know you’re busy.’ She cleared her throat and continued reading. ‘“Nothing ever happens here, Mouse, it’s the same thing every day. I hate that you’re so far away. I cried myself to sleep last night. I miss you. I miss you so much.”’ Sam stopped, her voice trembling.

  ‘When was that written?’

  Sam checked the date at the top of the page. ‘About two months after I started school in Utah.’

  ‘So … after she claims you assaulted her.’

  ‘She didn’t say assault, Jesus, she—’

  ‘I don’t have time to argue the semantics with you. The point is, she sent the letters afterwards. That’s interesting, isn’t it? How many are there?’ her manager asked, sharply, and Sam could almost hear the ideas forming in that steel-trap brain of hers.

  ‘Around two dozen.’

  ‘And they’re all like this?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Sam replied. She stretched her legs out, letting the letters rest in her lap. ‘They’re all signed off the same way, too. I will love you forever.’

  ‘Aaaand there’s the title for your new book. Yes! I am obsessed with this,’ Jane said. ‘We can pick the best, let’s say, fifteen letters? And open each chapter with a different one. That’s genius. Do you think Lisa kept the letters you sent back to her?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Sam couldn’t even imagine broaching the subject with her, not if that afternoon’s encounter was anything to go by. ‘That’s not the reason why I told you about these letters, I don’t think it’s—’