The Sleepover Is for the Alibi

How it begins

Jo had bought the same cereal.

That should have been touching.

Four grown women in a rented house, trying to recreate a weekend from twenty years earlier. Same sweet cereal. Same cheap nail polish. Same argument about which film to watch.

Mina noticed the spoon first.

"Don't use that one," Jo told Tessa. "It tastes of the drawer."

Tessa laughed.

"Everything in this place tastes of the drawer."

Mina looked up.

Those had been the exact words.

Not approximately. Not a shared joke repeated over the years. Jo had said the first sentence on the night Lorna disappeared, and Tessa had answered with the second.

Mina remembered because the old recording had caught them beneath a song she had been trying to identify for the police.

A camera on the kitchen counter blinked red.

"Lovely," said the producer from the doorway. "Very natural."

Nobody had said this would be filmed for a documentary. Jo had called it a private memory project. Something to mark a difficult anniversary without making the difficult part the only thing that mattered.

Mina put down her mug.

"Can we stop for a minute?"

The producer smiled.

"We're barely rolling."

"Then it'll be easy."

Jo reached for the cereal box. Her hand shook just enough to scatter a few pieces across the counter.

Mina watched one settle beside the camera.

There was a small printed card beneath its stand.

She could read it upside down.

SCENE FOUR. BREAKFAST EXCHANGE.

Below that were Jo's words about the spoon.

Below those, Tessa's answer.

At the bottom, in a different typeface, someone had added a note.

MINA SHOULD RECOGNIZE THIS.

The producer followed her gaze.

Mina checked the room's ordinary sounds automatically: refrigerator, rain gutter, a loose window latch. She wanted a record that nobody had scripted.

From the living room, the old song began to play.