‘Yeah, we’ve installed some skylights, made the windows bigger, changed out some of the gloomy, overstained old wood for lighter cedar and pine. It’s been crazy bright over the summer but as you can tell, it really does its work when the nights start to draw in. The kids love it.’

‘I can imagine. They probably don’t want to go home. Can I have a snoop around upstairs, or is he busy with a session?’

James checked his watch. ‘I think they’re on a break, so feel free. Come through and see us when you’re done. The coffee’s already on. It’s always on, I should say.’

He headed back and Suki made her way up the stairs towards the top floor. This was the staircase she’d chased up all those months ago, trying to stop Petra. That night had been such a clutter of indecent people and smell and noise and now it was unrecognisable. Walls and partitions of the poky rooms had been swiped away, the front wall had been blasted out and replaced with modern, minimalist luminescence, a glass wall framed with chunky stripped-timber beams. It was hard to tell where precisely the narrow sash window had been where Petra had attempted her escape.

A prize swathe of October afternoon sunlight spread itself over the stripped, sanded and sealed floor and the lightwood accents picked out the yellowed plane leaves, making them new. The room felt like a breathy Shinto temple, a million miles away from the stifling density of her home. Suki approached the glass and looked down to the pavement below, lost in thought for a moment before turning.

They’d hewn another large room out of the subdivided jumble of this level – the eastward room, the morning room – and this is where she’d find Vincent. As someone opened the door, she could hear the voices of the kids who’d come here to play. In the anteroom, a mother sat on the nutmeg-upholstered Japandi sofa, scrolling on her phone, a cup of green tea on the little round table beside her. The stylish sign on the wall behind the sofa – Vincent Rice Creative Therapies – was illustrated with one of his photos: mist-shrouded neon darkness on one side, resolving to an image of happy children running in sunlit uplands on the other. Suki nodded to her and slid the double-glazed glass door open.

Vincent was sitting at a long craft bench with four children of between eight and probably fifteen, cutting shapes out of large photographic prints. He smiled up when he heard her coming in.

‘I hope I’m not interrupting,’ Suki said, awkward around the small people. ‘James said you were on a break, but…’

‘We don’t mind if you join us, do we?’ he asked the kids.