She let herself in to a hallway ticking with silence and dust, a few letters and a slippery pile of junk mail skittering away as she pushed the door open. It was late morning but the gloomy September sky and the tall trees outside meant that the place was busy with shadows. She hurriedly flicked on all the light switches she could see, blinking at a chintzy lampshade that leapt into pastel life.

The living room was tidy, and dusty. There were no dirty cups, no half-read books propped on the sofa. There was an old red coat slung over the back of a chair, its thick wool pilling at the sleeves. The kitchen was in a similar state; everything cleaned and put away. Her mother had, Heather noticed, even turned the page over on the calendar to show September, despite knowing she wouldn’t be seeing the rest of the month.

“What was the point, Mum?” She tapped her fingers against the slick pages, noting that there was nothing written in the little boxes, no notes saying: “cancel milk/kill self.”

Heather stomped up the stairs, her footfalls muffled by the thick carpet. The main bedroom was as tidy as the rest of the little house. Her mother’s dressing table was clean and neat, glass jars of cold cream and bottles of perfume in rows like soldiers, while a pair of brushes lay next to an old-fashioned hand mirror. Heather sat down and looked at the brushes. Here, her mum had been less careful, less fastidious. There were strands of hair caught in the bristles, wisps of blonde and the occasional streak of wiry gray.

Organic material, thought Heather. For some reason the phrase seemed to settle in her chest, heavy and poisonous. You left behind organic material, Mum. Did you mean to?

The only thing out of place on the dressing table was a screwed-up ball of slightly yellowed paper, covered in a close-set typeface. In an effort to distract herself from the hairbrushes, Heather picked it up and smoothed it out, half expecting to see a page from one of her own articles—her mother might not have been in touch very often but Heather was sure she still kept a critical eye on her daughter’s career—but she quickly saw that it was a page from a book, possibly quite an old one, judging from the texture of the paper and the font. There was an old, woodcut illustration that at first she couldn’t get her head around—it seemed to show what looked like a goat, or possibly a lamb, standing over another animal. A dog, perhaps? The dog’s belly had been cut open, and smaller goats were pushing rocks inside the suspiciously clean opening. Heather’s eyes skipped to the text, which informed her that when the wolf woke up, he was thirsty, and he went to the river to drink …

It was a page from a book of fairy tales, but what her mother was doing with it, she had no idea. Colleen had never liked the older, gorier tales; story time when Heather had been little had involved a strict diet of happy ponies and girls at boarding school. The page made her feel uncomfortable: the strange picture, the way it had been crumpled up and left on the table. Did her mother even mean for her to see it?