‘Good, isn’t it?’ says Titch, brightly. ‘It’s an eighteenth-century political cartoon.’

Rose stares at the carefully rendered tendrils of meat that hang from the man’s teeth.

‘Come on in,’ Titch says.

They step into a room.

‘This is the drawing room,’ she says.

Rose stares. It looks like a living room.

‘And this is the loo,’ says Titch, opening a door.

Rose obligingly peers into a small toilet.

‘Kitchen – help yourself to anything – and dining room.’

Rose leans over Titch to look. A fitted kitchen is clogged with bottles and jars on every surface. None of it looks like food.

‘And your room. You’ve got an en suite.’ She smiles. ‘You must be tired. I’ll leave you to it.’

When the door closes behind Titch, Rose sits on the bed, then lies back, and looks up at the ceiling.

She stands, goes to the toilet attached to her room. She wonders what the en suite is.

Sitting on the toilet, she looks around. It’s like a normal room in miniature. It has books in it. She picks one up. It has cartoons. She reads one. It’s about people and horses. There seems no particular point to it. There are pictures on the wall. One is a pen and ink drawing of a house with a thatched roof and roses climbing the walls. It looks like Grandma’s cottage in ‘Little Red Riding Hood’. She wipes herself, still staring. A curl of inky smoke swirls from the chimney.

Rose doesn’t normally dream. But here she does. She dreams of clean sheets, and then she wakes in them, damp, and she drifts off again. The air is dense, warm. She dreams of Aaron, beside her in the bed. He rolls and stirs, restless, and she wakes and his legs are her legs, and she sleeps. She dreams of a long corridor, and a tatty rug, and windows through which flick scenes – a lake, a house, a man chewing on a leg. The sheets bunch around her and she knows she’s hidden what she needs in them somewhere. She rolls and twists, and in the sheets is the place where she’s hidden the trolley, the rack of chocolate, the bags of crisps.

She comes to with the smack of waking after a fever, the wide, drenched suddenness of it. The sheets are wet, and the mattress is exposed. She can feel the imprint of a button in the small of her back.

At breakfast, Titch has muesli and yoghurt, while Rose has toast and jam. Rose has orange juice. Titch has coffee.

Rose watches Titch eat. She puts the spoon in her mouth delicately, with a small, neat amount of yoghurt and a practised curl of the handle to make sure nothing is sloppy or spilt. She has the yoghurt first, then coffee. When she sips it, her eyes slip up over the top of her cup. Rose meets the glance, and Titch looks down.

Rose remembers the feel of her hand.