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Wrenmoor had not changed, which was its own kind of cruelty. The same low cottages leaned into the same wind, and the harbour wall held the same green stain at the tide line. Nora walked the lane with her collar up, counting the doors she remembered.

The village watched the way villages do — through curtains, over hedges, with a patience that felt almost tidal. She had forgotten how a place could hold you in its gaze without ever meeting your eye.

Mrs Pyke watched from behind her nets, and something in the old woman's stare told Nora she knew more about the glasshouse than the whole village combined. Nora lifted a hand. The net twitched and went still, and the lane was empty again but for the gulls.

The glasshouse stood at the end of the garden like a wreck hauled up from the seabed, its iron ribs furred with rust, half its panes gone to weather. Nora stood a long time before she could make herself open the door.

Inside, the air was green and close. Nora caught her own reflection in the cracked pane — grey eyes, her mother's eyes, rimmed with the sleeplessness of the last fortnight. For a moment the woman in the glass looked like Eve, and she had to turn away.

She set her bag on the staging and took out the notebook. Survey first, she told herself. Measure what is, before you grieve what was. The pencil shook only a little.

Detective Hollis met her at the gate, notebook already open, his manner the careful neutrality of a man who had asked these questions before. He had the local accent worn smooth by years of official speech.

“You'll understand we take an interest,” he said, “when a family comes back to a house like this one. People remember what happened. People talk.”

Nora gave him the answers she had rehearsed on the train. They were all true, which was not the same as being complete, and she suspected he knew the difference as well as she did.

The letter had no return address, only a postmark from a town she had never visited and a single line that would not leave her alone. By morning she had decided to go.

The coast was a two-day drive at least, but she packed a single bag and was standing on the shingle before the light had fully gone, the sea the colour of slate and the wind taking the breath out of her.

She found the cottage by its blue door, exactly as the letter had described it, and stood at the gate while the dark came down, not yet ready to knock.

I keep returning to the cellar door, to the cold that comes off it. [CHECK: does she know yet?] If I write it down perhaps the dreams will stop, but they never do, and the cold is always there in the morning like a hand on the back of my neck.

Daniel says I should leave it sealed. Daniel does not know what I found, or he pretends not to, and I am no longer sure which of those would frighten me more.

Twenty years and the house has been keeping it all this time, the way I have. We are both very good at keeping things.

In the flashback the table was laid for five, and Eve passed the salt across to their father, laughing at something only she had heard. The kitchen was loud with the ordinary noise of a family that did not yet know what was coming.

Nora watched from the doorway of her own memory, a child again, the smallest of them. She wanted to call out, to change the order of things, but memory does not take instruction.

When the scene dissolved she was alone in the present-day kitchen, the table bare, the steam from her own cup the only living thing in the room.