LITMIR.BIZ

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– yet the handwriting in her journal was graceful and refined. The entries were crafted around pencil sketches, handwritten notes, corners of maps and fragments of memorabilia from places she’d visited. Each page was a work of art brimming with its own tale.

      ‘Everything okay?’ Ed was standing in the doorway to Mia’s room.

      She nodded.

      He glanced at the backpack. ‘You’re going through her things?’

      ‘I’ve found her travel journal.’

      He straightened, surprised. ‘I didn’t realize she kept one.’ He pushed his hands into his pockets. ‘Are you going to read it?’

      ‘I think so. Yes. There’s so much I don’t know about her trip.’ And about her, she thought. They’d barely spoken while Mia was away. She wondered when this distance had grown between them. They used to be close once, but not lately. She sighed. ‘Why did she go, Ed?’

      ‘Travelling?’

      ‘Yes. She booked the trip so suddenly. Something must have happened to make her leave.’

      ‘She was just impulsive. Young. Bored. That’s all.’

      ‘I shouldn’t have let her go.’

      ‘Katie,’ he said gently, ‘you’ve had a long day. Perhaps you shouldn’t be looking at her journal tonight. Wait till morning, at least. I was just about to make us a snack. Why don’t you come into the kitchen? Keep me company?’

      ‘Maybe in a minute.’

      When the door closed, she flicked through the pages and picked an entry at random. As she began to read, her gaze jumped from phrase to phrase – ‘cinder desert’, ‘Finn and me’, ‘deep violet sky’, ‘lunar landscape’ – as if each word was too hot for her mind to settle on. She squeezed her eyes shut and then reopened them, trying to focus on a single sentence. But it was hopeless; her gaze roamed over the words, but her mind refused to digest them.

      Frustrated, she flicked on. She passed an entry where a sketched bird took flight from the bottom of a page, and another where Mia’s writing spiralled around an invisible coil as if being sucked downwards. Her heartbeat quickened when she realized she was travelling towards the back of the journal, her fingertips skimming the edges of each page as they drew her to Mia’s final entry.

      Reaching it, Katie paused. There would be things, she knew already, which she’d rather not learn, but like a passer-by being drawn to the sight of a crash, she was unable to look away.

      Staring at the final entry she saw that just one side of the double spread was filled. The adjoining page was missing; it had been ripped out leaving behind a jagged edge near the spine of the journal. Her eyes fixed on the remaining page, which was filled with an intricate pencil drawing of the profile of a female face. Within the face a series of detailed doodles had been drawn: a roaring dark wave, a screaming mouth, falling stars, a hangman with six blank dashes, an empty phone dangling from a wire.

      Katie snapped the journal shut and stood.

      She shouldn’t have looked; it was too soon. Already new questions were swimming to the surface of her thoughts. What did the illustrations mean? Why had a page been torn out? What had been on it? She pushed the journal back towards the bag as if returning it to the backpack would stop the stream of doubts rushing forwards, but in her hurry the journal fell free of her hands, and as it spilt to the floor, something glided from its pages.

      Bending to retrieve it she saw it was the stub of Mia’s first boarding pass: London Heathrow to San Francisco. Her fingers moved across the smooth white card as she thought about Mia arriving in San Francisco full of the anticipation of travelling. She tried picturing the places Mia visited, wondering about the people she had met, imagining what she might have experienced – but Mia’s travels were a mystery, six lost months Katie was desperate to understand. Six months that the journal held the key to.

      As she held Mia’s plane ticket between her fingers, an idea began to form.

      *

      Katie barely slept that night as the idea shaped itself into a purpose. The next morning she rose early and strode into Putney High Street searching for a travel agency. She placed Mia’s itinerary on the desk of a woman who wore coral-pink lipstick on cracked lips. ‘I would like to book the same route.’

      She could have done it online, but felt the decision was too important to be made on the click of a button. Perhaps she had anticipated hesitation from the saleswoman, as if someone would tell her this was a foolish, impulsive idea, but instead the lady had taken a sip from her steaming mug of coffee, then simply asked, ‘When would you like to go?’

      Now, five days later, she sat on the wooden floorboards in her bedroom trying to pack. The contents of Mia’s backpack fanned around her feet, and her own clothes waited tentatively in half-built piles within a purple suitcase. She was usually a decisive and methodical packer, but she had no clue what to pack for this trip. In a few hours she was due to board a flight to San Francisco, exactly as Mia had done six months earlier.

      Her bedroom door opened and Ed entered, carrying two mugs of tea. He passed her one and then lowered himself onto the floor beside her, his suit trousers pulling tight across his knees and revealing half an inch of skin above his socks.

      She took a sip of tea. He made it exactly how she liked it: not too strong, a generous splash of milk and half a spoonful of sugar.

      He eyed the piles of belongings sceptically. ‘There’s still time to change your mind. Work would have you back, you know.’

      She had quit her job as a senior recruitment consultant as she’d walked back from the travel agency. After dedicating herself to the same company since graduation, she had only needed a five-minute phone call to leave. ‘I can’t go back.’ The idea of returning to the office, taking a seat at her corner desk beneath the air-conditioning vent that aggravated her eyes, and pretending that placing candidates was still important to her, seemed utterly ludicrous.

      ‘Why not wait a few weeks? I am almost certain I’ll be able to juggle holiday. We could go together … not everywhere, but Bali. You can see where—’

      ‘I need to start this from the beginning.’ Katie’s coping mechanism was structure. After her mother’s death, she had ruthlessly filled her diary with social engagements, taking command of every free hour that might otherwise have been idled away in the folds of self-pity. She attacked her job with equal vigour, working around the clock with such steely focus that, three months later, she got a promotion.

      Losing Mia felt different. Work and social distractions were no match for her grief, which was thick and black. Finding Mia’s travel journal seemed like a small glimmer of light in the gloom, so she had made a decision to follow it, entry by entry, country by country, in the hope that retracing Mia’s steps would help her to understand her death. For the first time since the police arrived on her doorstep, Katie felt as if she had a sense of purpose.

      ‘I know we’ve talked about this,’ Ed said, ‘but I am still struggling to understand your logic.’

      ‘You know how difficult things were between me and Mia before she left,’ she said, setting aside her tea. ‘And I let her go … I was relieved to see her go.’

      ‘Mia’s death is not your fault.’

      Wasn’t it? She had seen Mia was unhappy when they were living together, but she had let her loose anyway. Mia was her little sister, her responsibility. And Katie had failed her. ‘The journal is all I have left. It’s a link to six months of her life that I missed.’

      ‘So read it. I’ve already told you I’m happy to do it with you.’

      She’d discovered Ed thumbing through the journal the morning after she’d found it, checking that there was nothing that would upset her. She knew he was being kind, but she didn’t want his

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