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'We have had one report from someone in Carinya Street, just round the corner from you, Dr Lambert,' the older officer said. 'A child fitting Ellie's description running along the footpath at about five o'clock. Perhaps a bit later.'

Malcolm looked at his watch. 'Now it's six. No one else saw anything?'

'We're still checking. But feel the frost in the air. People are inside by that hour, not hanging around outside. They've just got home from work, or they're not home yet. They're cooking. It's getting dark. The fact that no one saw anything—'

'I know.' Malcolm nodded. 'Doesn't mean—'

'Anything
, really,' Lucy came in shakily. Malcolm's fingers still made a chilly bracelet on her arm. She wanted to lean against him,
hold
him. The need in her was even stronger now.

'Don't be worried, Ellie's daddy,
please
,' begged a little voice.

Four adults turned in her direction, and there was a sudden silence and the faintest dawning of hopeful possibility. The younger of the two police officers, who looked of an age to have a kindergarten child himself, squatted down.

'But aren't you worried, Charlotte?'

'Yes,' she replied promptly.

'Then why don't you think we should be?'

'I don't want Ellie's dad to be upset.'

'But if she's missing...' He paused deliberately, and the adult gazes now fixed on Charlotte were expectant and searching and just slightly accusatory.

She gazed back for a long moment...then wavered... and crumbled...and cried. 'She's not missing,' she sobbed. 'She's in the shed. She's going to live there.'

'The shed?' Malcolm barked hoarsely. 'We don't have a— You mean
here?'

'Yes. Here. In our shed.'

'That's almost three kilometres she must have run,' Lucy murmured.

'We've made it all lovely, with pillows and blankets and—'

No one waited to hear any more. Malcolm had already flung himself out of the back door, stumbling down the steps on long legs that would scarcely hold him.

'Ellie!' he was yelling. 'Ellie, answer me, are you there?'

Hard on his heels, Lucy and the two policemen heard, 'Yes, and I'm
cold,
and I'm wheezy, and I forgot my inhaler, and this shed isn't nice in the dark after all.'

In the background, the older policeman pulled out his walkie-talkie and unleashed a short burst of economical police jargon. Relief was conveyed in the tone rather than the words or the body language.

Malcolm was less reticent about showing what he felt. 'Ellie, you must never,
ever
leave home without telling me, ever,
ever
again!'

Lucy heard the sob in his throat and watched his knees buckle as he squatted down. Ellie had come stumbling out of the shed and into his arms with her torch beam quavering. It was quite dim. The little thing must have had it on continuously since she'd arrived, and its ^batteries were giving out already. Lucy recognised the torch. It normally lived under her own kitchen sink. She wondered grimly how long it had been gone.

Malcolm had pulled Ellie's inhaler from his pocket. He must have grabbed it in a hurry at home with some dim—and, as it turned out, accurate—notion that it might be needed. He didn't have the spacer, but Ellie was managing well without it, drawing in a deep breath as he instructed her, and then another. 'OK, darling girl, OK, that's good. You'll stop wheezing soon. That cold, damp air in the shed isn't any good for you at all, is it?'

Peering into the shed, Lucy saw that with sunny daylight coming in through its single window, it might indeed have looked 'all lovely', as Charlotte had said. Had she achieved all this today? Or had the plan been in train for days?

No, it was weeks, she concluded, thinking back on those excited sessions with the door shut in Charlotte's room and the busy activity in the garden.

'My fault,' she said under her breath. 'I've been meaning to clear this out for weeks, and instead I haven't even looked in here. It still has all our boxes from the move. Well, Charlotte and Ellie have done half the work for me!'

The cement floor was freshly swept. Boxes and tools were piled neatly around the walls. In the centre, there were several pillows and cushions on the floor, as well as a picnic rug and a sleeping bag, and all the toy dishes and cutlery. Provisions, too. Water in an old milk container. Sandwiches. Cereal. A flask of milk. A juice box.

A six-year-old's idea of all the necessities of survival, in other words, but the lonely reality of the place after dark on a cold autumn evening had Charlotte marvelling at Ellie's bravery in sticking it out even as long as she had, torch notwithstanding.

Malcolm had his face buried in Ellie's spun gold hair, and he was still shaking. Lucy reached out and ran her hand across his shoulders, then left it there, kneading the strong, solid flesh gently. When he straightened at last, and her hand fell away, she didn't even know if he'd felt her touch at all.

'Let's all go inside,' he said.

There was a confusing flurry of activity and talk. Malcolm thanked the police for their prompt and sensitive response. They seemed as glad at the harmless, happy ending as if they'd been personally involved. Malcolm rang Jenny and Clare, who were still back at his place, and told them the news.

Lucy put on a saucepan of milk to make hot chocolate for Ellie, drained her pot of spaghetti, looked at its immediate disintegration into total mush and decided to start all over again. She'd need twice as much if Ellie and Malcolm were going to stay for dinner, anyway. And of course they were! Was the ill-fated curry safely switched off at Malcolm's place? she wondered.

Finally, when things were quiet she felt a small hand creep into hers.

Charlotte.

'Are you very,
very
cross, Mummy?'

Where has she been during all this fuss? Lucy asked herself. Hiding in her wardrobe, it turned out, in fear of terrible consequences.

Lucy bent down, aware that Malcolm and Ellie were listening. Malcolm was standing in the kitchen doorway, with Ellie still wrapped safely in his arms as if he didn't plan on letting her go for a long time. Ellie was sipping her hot chocolate.

'I'm not cross, my love,' she said carefully, 'but that's mainly because I'm too relieved and happy to discover that Ellie is safe to feel cross about
anything.
Big people get
terribly
worried when they think their children have gone missing, darling. You're both so precious to us. You must never try and make a great big plan like that without telling us.
Why
did you try and make a place for Ellie to live in the back shed without telling us?'

'Because you would have said no, and we want to live in the same place. We want to be sisters...'

'Oh, my Lord,' Lucy whispered as she heard Malcolm's heartfelt groan, and then the truth just came spilling out, without a moment's pause for thought. 'Darling, you
are
sisters. You're sisters already.'

'Why
the hell did you say it?' Malcolm demanded two hours later.

The spaghetti had disappeared into four hungry stomachs, the dishes had been washed and put away, stories had been read, teeth had been cleaned, and the girls were both asleep in Charlotte's room. Ellie was wearing one of her own nighties, retrieved from her small stash of running-away clothes in the shed. Somehow, it hadn't occurred to any of them that Ellie and Malcolm should go home.

Now, Malcolm's question burst forth, as if from a pressure cooker, as they stood awkwardly together in the living room. Both adults had been simmering all evening with unsaid things, and an amoeba could have sensed that Malcolm was angry.

Lucy, being a considerably more advanced life form than an amoeba, was acutely
sensitive to his anger, and had been waiting for his outburst with both determination and dread.

The two girls had displayed a uniquely six-year-old response to Lucy's earth-shattering revelation. Ellie was thrilled down to her toes about the fact that she now had grandparents, even though, technically, she didn't. And she was quite convinced that she should now start calling Lucy 'Mummy'. Charlotte was already planning to tell everyone at school the moment she saw them.

Thank goodness it was the weekend! Lucy thought.

There might just be time to bring them both back to reality by the end of it.

In summary, disdaining any curiosity whatsoever as to the mechanics of how such a thing could be, they had both simply taken the news as a blindingly obvious piece of serendipity which they had known in their hearts all along.

As perhaps it was.

Malcolm, at the moment, didn't seem to think so, however. He wasn't waiting for Lucy to answer his question. It had apparently been rhetorical in nature, and an answer hadn't actually been required.

Instead, he ploughed on heatedly, 'It's the absolute antithesis of what you said when we talked about it before...and what I knew you still felt every time we've verged on the subject since. You wanted to wait. You
insisted
we wait. And then, all of a sudden, without the slightest prior consultation, you simply come bursting out with it and—' He broke off and his words degenerated into incoherent splutterings.

Lucy faced him without flinching. 'I didn't
plan
it, Malcolm! Good heavens, ten minutes before that we were both totally distraught. And once we'd found her, and she was safe and sound in that warm kitchen of mine, and I was about to put some hot food into her, I was so light-headed with relief it just came out. And they took it well, didn't they?'

'Aagh! Don't
say
that!
I
always thought that they would take it well.
You
are the one who argued that they wouldn't.'

'No! I never argued that!' she exclaimed, knowing there were some small eddies of illogicality swirling around in her argument but feeling too heated to care about what they were. 'It wasn't their initial reaction I feared, Malcolm. It was what would happen later, when the novelty wore off. I—I'm still afraid about that.'

She frowned, the passionate aftermath of relief and dizzy confidence ebbing swiftly now to allow all her doubts to come flooding back again. What had really changed in their situation? The girls had gone to bed full of wonderful plans about being sisters, but when it came down to cold, hard reality they were still two separate families, with Malcolm's inability to take the risk of full commitment standing in the way of this fact ever changing.

'Terrified, actually,' she added in a small voice.

'Oh,
hell,
Lucy!'

He pulled her roughly into his arms, holding -her tightly as he gazed down into her eyes. His kiss was there in his face, so she couldn't have claimed surprise as an excuse. She was angry and emotional and terribly afraid about what she felt, and it would have been far better to stiffen, push away, fight him,
reject
him, but she just couldn't.

His mouth coming down on hers and staying there was just so
right
that she couldn't act on principle or in self-preservation. She returned his kiss, loving everything about it—his taste, the soft strength of his mouth, the words he murmured that she couldn't understand, the way he used his hands to explore and claim her.

Those hands were everywhere, softly grazing the most sensitive parts of her skin as he slid them inside her light cotton pullover, running them over the curves of her hips and breasts, cupping and squeezing her rear end as he pulled her even closer. Oh, yes, he was
claiming
her all right!

All at once, she
did
have the strength to fight, and used her flattened palms to push him away. Her movements were as rough as his had been when he'd taken hold of her.

'I can't do this, Malcolm,' she told him abruptly. 'Not any more. It hurts too much. Tell me what you want from me. Don't leave me guessing. I can't stand it. I feel I know
nothing
about what's happening here, other than the fact that what I feel
hurts.'

'Oh, Lucy, I'm so sorry,' he whispered. 'This is all my fault, isn't it?'

'Yes,' she agreed helplessly, hugging her arms around herself. Without him, the air seemed cold on her body. 'Totally.'

It was much quieter in the kitchen now. The fridge hummed, and the heating vent in the corner made a little ticking sound every now and again as the gas furnace came on and began to heat the house.

'And you've started wondering if it's remotely worth you sticking this out, haven't you?' Malcolm asked softly.

'Something like that,' she agreed again. 'Except that it doesn't seem as if I have much choice. I—I feel sometimes as if I'd stop loving you if I could, only there's no way in the world that I can. So I'm just
stuck
with it, and—'

'Don't stop loving me, Lucy,
please
,' he said. 'I want you to go on loving me for the rest of your life.'

'But—'

'I want you to marry me.'

'To—'

'Marry me.'

'Just like that?' she almost shrieked.

He stilled. 'Damn, is that really how it seems to you?
Just like that?'

She could only nod tremulously.

'Oh, Lucy...!' He buried his face in her hair and she could feel the passion in every tightened muscle and every throbbing pulse. 'Have you not understood that this is where I wanted it to lead all along?'