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I was in the midst of one of those ‘getting chased’ dreams when my phone asserted itself, rattling against the side of my skull too insistently to be incorporated into some subconscious narrative. I woke up, heart racing and still afraid. I knew instantly that it was Aoife calling— she had tried again as I lay on the cusp of sleep the night before. I groped around in the bedding, feeling for the phone, two black rings right in the middle of my vision from the brightness overhead.

‘Aoife?’ My voice was thick and fatigued.

‘Else? Thank god, I’ve been trying you for— ’ Someone yelled out to her and I heard her saying, ‘My sister, she’s in New York.’ This was followed by a muffled discussion. I put the phone on speaker and looked at the screen. I had slept through seven calls. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘Look, I’m at Mum’s. Something’s happened.’ Her voice moved away from the phone and I heard her talking to someone else again. ‘Here, can you tell her? I’ve just got to— ’

‘Hi?’ Another voice, light but male, a man of my generation—eater of hot sauce and reader of The Guardian. ‘Elspeth, it’s Drew.’ Drew was my sister’s husband, a man whose entire identity was a list of middle-class aspirations that Aoife would rattle off with apparent disinterest. ‘Drew’s hoping to be made regional manager,’ or ‘Drew wants to upgrade the car.’ I had never met him but my mind offered a social-media supercut— dark brows, slender build, puffer jacket and beanie, hungry-eyed and with a certain weakness around the chin. I had decided long ago that he was the type of man who would fall hard and fast for a well-deployed compliment.

‘Drew, what’s going on? What’s up with Mum?’ Somehow, in this briefest of conversations, I had gone from half lying down to standing up, my chest constricting in anticipation.

‘We don’t know,’ Drew said, his panic replicating my own. ‘Aoife went over this morning, and she wasn’t home, but it was weird, she’d left stuff on and the downstairs had been torn apart . . .’ He trailed off and took an audible breath. ‘We called the police, they’ve just arrived, and we’ve asked the neighbours. No one seems to have seen her in a while so we’re worried. It looks bad.’

‘Looks bad,’ I repeated.

‘Yeah, the cops are saying that . . .’

There were sounds at his end, more talking and then Aoife had the phone again. ‘Elsie? We have to go, but I’ll call you when we know more. All right?’

‘Okay,’ I agreed. ‘I’ll wait to hear from you.’

I got up then, put on a pot of coffee and made a painstakingly detailed file note of our conversation. I’ve been doing this on and off since I was a teenager. I do it because when I don’t I spend a lot of time, really a lot, replaying conversations in my head, trying to remember what was said and by whom and their tone and intonation. If I don’t make a note of the exchange, I panic later, worried that I might have said something embarrassing or awkward or threatening. The irony, of course, is that I then spend a lot of time worrying that my notes are inaccurate anyway.

Once this was done, I settled in for a very early start to the day, half hoping to hear at some point in the morning that my mother had been located alive and well and that there was some perfectly mundane explanation for her disappearance. Simultaneously, expertly, my mind assured me that of course this would not transpire. That I knew better.

My mother had always been one of those people who things happen to. Her whole life had been a succession of serendipitous coincidence and quirks of fate that had blown her one way and then the other. At sixteen, she had, quite literally, been stopped on the street by a talent scout and told that she should consider modelling— two months later she moved to Paris; at twenty she returned to Australia and met my father, an artist who adopted her as his muse; a few months after that she was married and then knocked up, then knocked up again, then abandoned by my father (a story for another day) and widowed. There had been at least one more tumultuous relationship, a book about her personal style and modelling history, and now, as she was approaching sixty, something that looked bad had happened.

I opened my laptop and was instantly greeted by her face in the blank screen. Well, my face. But at some point in the last few years I had begun to resemble her. As a girl, I had always hoped that this would happen, but all through my childhood, up until the day I left, people were always comparing me to my father. Now, something had happened, and here she was, looking back at me. I closed the computer and stood up.

‘There’s nothing you can do,’ I told myself while I paced the tiny apartment. ‘Just work while you can.’ I sat down again, turned the computer on and tried just typing at random, a technique I had learned in some online ‘conquer your procrastination’ course I’d half-heartedly enrolled in earlier in the year, but no inspiration came. I got up and went to the window. The world beyond the apartment was still. I opened it a little and the smell of the city came in— engine oil, the East River, the tang of trash.

I lived in Tudor City, a fabulous old crack of a neighbourhood in Midtown, where the bankers used to hide their mistresses in the 1920s, while their wives stayed uptown in apartments looking out on the park. I’d taken a sublet on a sublet after Keith. After he chose Her.

Aoife called me back at 10.30 a.m. I was deep into my fourth coffee by this point, watching the day squeeze itself into the last dark nooks and crannies of the city, occasionally typing a disjointed sentence or two, my mind returning again and again to my mother while a hangover attached itself to the back of my skull.

‘They said it’s definitely suspicious,’ she said. She sounded breathless. ‘I mean, it was obvious from the state of the place but anyway . . .’ She petered out before she finished the thought.

‘Oh.’ It was too insubstantial a response so I followed up. ‘What else did they say?’

Aoife ignored my question. ‘I think we saw blood, Else, in the house . . . a tiny bit in the hallway. And her phone is off and, god, I’m really worried and it’s getting dark and I haven’t spoken to her for weeks. Have you?’

‘I’m not sure.’ I tried to count back the days to our last conversation. ‘It’s definitely been a little while. What else did the police say?’

‘They just said that they’re worried right now. They’re going to do a search and a doorknock and other things.’

‘Maybe she’s gone away somewhere?’ I was clutching at straws, of course.

My sister clicked her tongue impatiently. ‘The house, Else, the house. Something must have happened.’ She paused. ‘I think maybe . . .’

I knew what she was going to ask so I cut her off before she could finish. ‘Is there anything I can do from here?’ I didn’t want to go home, back to Australia, back to Geelong— cultural backwater, purveyor of nothing. Please don’t say it, I begged her silently. Please just tell me that you’ll take care of it all, like you always have. There was a reason it was like this— because that was where our respective skill sets lay. Aoife excelled at being responsible, at being organised, at planning and diarising and doing the right thing and, for the most part, pretending to enjoy it. I excelled at being in a different country.

‘Elsie, I need you back here,’ she said. ‘Please. I just . . . I just want you here.’

I took a deep breath, imagined myself getting on the plane, going through customs, throwing myself at the mercy of my old life. ‘I’ll think about it,’ I said. ‘Just let me see.’

Aoife sighed but we hung up with mutual assurances that everything would be all right and that she, our mother, would be found.

At 2 p.m., she sent me a text message telling me she was going to get a few hours’ sleep and would call me when she woke up. I imagined my sister in some bland suburban set-up with Drew and her two kids, the four of them tucked under a beige duvet together, Aoife putting everyone to sleep by reading aloud from a comprehensive to-do list.

I went downstairs and waded into the heat of the city. I walked sluggishly down 2nd, trying to think of how best to explain to Aoife that I couldn’t go back: about which excuse would garner the least outcry. Maybe God will intervene, I thought. Maybe there will be some disaster here that prevents me leaving— another pandemic, a terrorist attack, anything. Immediately I felt disgusted with myself and tried to come up with three kind thoughts to counteract my brain’s appalling first instinct.

I took a right at 38th and sat down on a bench. They had just opened a new Sephora up the block, and two teenage girls, oblivious to the heat, walked past with black-and-white shopping bags hanging off their wrists, one of them already removing a lip gloss from its elaborate packaging and smearing it across plump young lips. How I envied them. I got my phone out of my bag, intending to scroll idly for a minute and then head back to my apartment. There was a new message from Keith.

You’re really gonna make me call the cops? For fuck’s sake.

It was at that moment I realised I would have to go back, that I had no choice.

Extracted from The Missing Mother by Mali Cornish, available now.

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The Missing Mother

by Mali Cornish

A razor-sharp psychological suspense thriller for fans of Gillian Flynn about the family secrets that bind us - and break us.

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