While she rinsed out her bra and hung it over the towel radiator to dry, she thought about Isaac. He often used to call for her brother. Sometimes he’d even come upstairs to Thom’s bedroom to listen to music and do whatever teenage boys did when they were together. She’d peek at him through the crack in her bedroom door as he climbed the stairs and watch from her window as they left for the park, swaggering in that way cocky lads do. Isaac had been out of her league, of course. Even aside from the verbal and actual mudslinging between Isaac and her friends from the posh school, there was the age difference. And he was also her big brother’s mate—so not cool to have the nerdy baby sister simpering after you.

Nory climbed into the gloriously squishy four-poster bed and allowed herself to revel momentarily in living as the other half did. She wondered about the people who had slept in this room when the castle was a family home, before it became a wedding venue and a playhouse for the wealthy.

Her mind drifted back to Isaac, growing up here in the castle grounds, and then drawn back here again as an adult. Does anyone ever truly leave the place where they grew up? she wondered. Even if you never physically returned, a part of the place would always travel with you surely. Like an imprint, a tattoo on your psyche. At least that’s how Nory felt about the village of Hartmead.

She felt comfortably displaced, like a ghost still walking the halls of its old home. She hadn’t expected it to churn up so many emotions, feelings she thought she’d left behind her, that sense that she’d only ever half-belonged in either of the places she called home. She could feel herself reshaping to fit into an old skin. She sighed, opened Good Omens by Neil Gaiman at her bookmark, and read until she fell asleep with the book open on her chest.

Nine

When Isaac’s Range Rover pulled into the courtyard behind the castle the next morning, the rest of the house party had already headed off to a morning of archery. The sky was the color of lentil soup, heavy and brooding with either rain or snow. It wasn’t common to have snow so early in winter—though it did sometimes happen this high up—but the weather forecasters had been warning of an extreme cold front closing in from the east. Nory—who had been sheltering from the cold wind in the porchway of the staff entrance—crossed to the car and climbed in, shivering as she pulled the door shut behind her.

“Good morning,” Isaac said.

“Good morning to you,” she replied, throwing a bag containing the clothes she’d borrowed onto the backseat.