Once he has finished shaking out the coal, he passes Lauren, looking straight ahead, before kneeling by the hearth. His glassy eyes dart between the woman’s blank face and his twists of newspaper, ready to burn. Above him, on the mantelpiece, stand a Himalayan salt lamp and two chunky amethysts, halved like purple fruit, their insides catching the light. Crystals hang over the sliding doors to the overgrown garden. These are objects that belonged to Lauren’s mother, before she slipped out of their lives, when Lauren was a baby. Lauren’s father doesn’t like her asking questions too often. Their house is still filled with these salt lamps and candles. Niall says they belong to him, but Lauren knows they are her mother’s. The only times Niall will speak of her, your mother, is when he has drunk four glasses or more. Your mother. Two words that sound soft together. He never says too much though, only that her mother was a healer and different to anyone else. They met when she was eighteen and had moved to Strath Horne after a stint in Edinburgh. If Lauren tries to ask where she might be now, Niall says she must have gone on to better things. This makes Lauren scared to ask any more, scared that this means she, as a daughter, was not a good thing and her mother was looking for something better. Maybe her father doesn’t like to talk because he knows she won’t like to hear what he has to say.

There is only one photo in the house, taken by Lauren’s granny, who has now passed, where her mother is so young she looks as though she could be Lauren’s classmate. Sometimes if Lauren is browsing in a shop in Strath Horne, which is only a little bigger than a village, she will notice women looking at her out of the corner of their eyes. Children have made strange comments in the cloakrooms at school, before talking among themselves. Lauren hopes one day she’ll be able to overhear a hushed conversation long enough to understand.

From her seat on the sofa, the woman is looking at Lauren on the floor. She doesn’t seem happy or sad, but empty. Lauren wonders what she is thinking, if she is thinking anything at all.

‘Would you like …?’ says Lauren in a quiet voice. ‘Would you like …’ She bites her lip and looks away. She thinks maybe the woman needs a hug, the way she would hug Ann-Marie when she’s sad, but something stops her. There is a long pause while Niall scrunches a ball of magazine pages to add to the fire. She takes a breath and looks back. ‘… something to drink?’