Bloody great, she thought, standing back as if something might reveal itself. Another huge bill that I don’t have any money to pay.

Tara sloshed back to the stairs, pulled off her soaked socks and ran up to the dining room.

Toby was watching YouTube on his laptop, but when he saw her he pulled off his headphones and slammed the lid shut. ‘What?’

‘I need you to come and look at something in the cellar,’ she said, trying not to alert Molly to any problem. ‘Now,’ she added, with emphatic eyebrows.

‘The cellar’s flooding,’ he announced, as they stood on the bottom step. There was now two inches of water covering the floor.

‘I know that, but where’s it coming from?’

‘It’s coming from the sky, Tara.’

‘But it can’t—’

‘It is.’ Toby rolled up his jeans and splashed across to the wine rack, where he started stuffing bottles under his arm. ‘We need to shift these before the water gets any higher.’

Still Tara hunted around for a different reason. ‘There must be a tap on somewhere? Or the freezer’s defrosting …’

‘You can’t be in denial about everything, Tara.’ Toby returned to the lower wine racks. ‘But you can look for a magic spring if you want. And while you’re looking, make sure Mum didn’t store anything down here that might get ruined by floodwater.’

‘Like what?’

‘Like, antiques? Valuables? What’s in those boxes?’ He pointed to a stack of storage boxes in the corner.

‘Mobile chargers and Farrow & Ball paint cards,’ said Tara. She’d had a cursory look a few weeks ago. ‘I only got down as far as the first three but it’s all the same.’

‘Well, we need to move them anyway.’ He boggled his eyes at her. ‘Come on, hurry up. This is our house now. Mum and Dad aren’t in charge, we are.’

Tara stared at her brother and her stomach curdled. Maybe this was a good time to tell him? Maybe he’d feel relieved not to be responsible for a flooding house. ‘Toby, about Mum’s will. She didn’t—’

‘Tara! Taaaara!’ Molly was calling from upstairs.

‘One second!’ Tara called. Do it, she told herself, just tell him now. ‘Mum didn’t leave—’

The cellar door opened, and Molly called down the stairs, ‘Your phone’s ringing, Tara. Please will you answer it? It might be Daddy.’

‘Get that,’ said Toby, at the same time as she said, ‘I should get that.’

Tara headed upstairs, two at a time.

The phone had stopped ringing by the time she’d got to it, and when she saw whose call she’d missed, Tara didn’t care that it had gone to voicemail.

It wasn’t Keith, it was David.