There was so much to think of with every room; what to do with clothes, knick-knacks, old photographs – even boring things like bed linen and curtains. And with every room came a new cascade of memories, as though every space was packed with ghosts from her childhood. Most of them were not as pleasant as playing with modelling clay on the floor of her bedroom, either. And as she stood in the door of the bathroom, remembering a blazing row that had resulted in Heather kicking the bath so hard she had to go to A & E, she wondered why on earth she hadn’t brought someone with her to do this. Terry, her housemate, had even offered to help, but she had turned him down automatically. Nikki, too, she was certain, would have been glad to shoulder some of this unpleasantness.

What was that about? Was she worried Terry would have judged her for this ordinary, suburban childhood? Or was she more afraid of him seeing her in a vulnerable state?

Going through the paperwork and shifting things around had tracked dust all over, so she dragged the Hoover out and pushed it – somewhat unenthusiastically – around the living room. As she was chasing down a few errant hairs, the edge of the nozzle smacked against something solid underneath the sofa. Reaching down, she tugged the blockage out and was surprised to see it was a book, and quite an old one by the looks of it. She rubbed the dust and fluff off, and frowned at the cover. It was a collection of fairy tales, a battered old paperback, and on the front was a large black wolf, its jaws agape to reveal every one of its lethal teeth.

‘Weird.’ She chucked it on the sideboard and finished up.

Dumping a sack of recycling outside, by the front door, Heather took a deep breath of cold autumnal air. Out here, when she had been around seven or eight, she had sat with her new magnifying glass, burning little holes into dried leaves and pieces of paper, whatever she could get her hands on. Ants, she had discovered, popped when you burned them with the magnifying glass, and she’d spent an entertaining afternoon creating lots of tiny shrivelled bodies on the path until her mother had come outside and caught her at it.

Heather had been banned from the garden for a week, at the height of summer, and she still remembered her simmering fury so clearly it made her cheeks feel hot. Trapped in her room, she had taken to other petty forms of destruction – breaking the plates her sandwiches arrived on, tipping her mother’s perfume down the bathroom sink. She had been so angry then – and that had only made things worse.