She had known that staying in her mother’s house would summon a lot of uncomfortable feelings, and so it was with no great surprise that she felt a shroud of misery settle over her when she woke up in an unfamiliar bed. Once, this had been her dad’s box room, full of his random junk – old car manuals, big plastic buckets for home brewing beer, and a massive chest freezer, which her mum had filled with frozen ready meals and tubs of Neapolitan ice cream. As a kid, Heather had loved the room, convinced it contained all her dad’s secrets. Now, the guest room was small, and neat, and entirely without personality, but even so Heather couldn’t help but feel her mother there still – in the pile of towels on the footstool, the doily on the window sill, the empty vase. It was too quiet, and too cold, so she got up and put the heating on as high as it would go, and put on both the television and radio. Once there was a comforting level of noise, she made herself a strong cup of tea, sat at the kitchen table, and began making a list of things that needed doing.

To her surprise, she found her mother’s address book almost straight away – it was sitting in a wooden magazine rack in the living room, half forgotten – and as quickly as possible, she called everyone who needed to be called, passing out bad news, and taking in condolences. When that ugly business was done, she found herself wandering back upstairs, her hand resting on the doorknob of her old room. Holding in a sigh, she stepped inside. It was still possible to recognize it as hers; the duvet cover on the bed, neatly turned down and clean, of a colour only a teenager would choose, and the wallpaper that still had a series of tiny bald patches from old Blu Tack, to hold posters in place – the posters her mother had taken down and rolled into tubes not long after she’d left home. During her visits over the years, Heather had got used to the fact that this wasn’t her room any more, but for the first time she noticed that her mother had apparently started using it for other things – there was a small card table in the corner, covered with crafting materials.