“We could do Airbnb,” Shy’s father had suggested once. “Let out a room or two to travelers.”

“And have a bunch of strangers tromping around, stealing things and stopping up the toilets? I don’t think so,” Wendy said, ending the conversation.

“I’m home,” Shy called again. “Are you here?”

“Here,” Roy Clarke called from the library, which was really just the far right-hand portion of the gigantic open-plan living room. Somehow Wendy had convinced them to call it the library because it was where most of the bookshelves were. “All writers have libraries,” she declared, and thus it was so.

Roy Clarke was sprawled in his favorite armchair, his bathrobe tied over his clothes, a book in his lap. The TV was on but muted, a cooking show.

“I showered and got dressed and went out this morning. I brought my computer and everything,” he announced as Shy came into the room. “I even wrote a few words over a nice cup of tea at the most perfect old bar. I’m so glad I discovered it. I wrote the beginning of a chapter, or the beginning of something anyway. Then I got pretty famished from all the writing, so I went to the supermarket. And then I came home.”

“I’m not Mum,” Shy said. “I don’t care.” She sniffed the air. It smelled like cinnamon. “Did you bake something? It smells amazing.”

Her father’s gray-whiskered face turned pink. “You know those cinnamon buns that come in the tins that you pop open and bake and then squirt that pasty sugary stuff on?”

She nodded.

“I’d never had them before,” her father went on. “I went to Key Food for bread and cheese and came out with those. I baked them, and then I ate them all. Marvelous.”

“What about that guy’s cat, the invisible one?”

“Fed it already.”

Shy unzipped her hoodie and kicked off her sneakers. “I’m starving.” It was cold in the house. She flopped down on the sofa and pulled the cashmere throw over her legs and feet. By assuming the pose of a sick girl, she now felt a true chill coming on. “Will you make me a cheese toastie?” It was what her father called a grilled cheese and what she craved whenever she had a cold or cramps.

“Are you poorly, my sweet?” her father asked, exaggerating his accent.