Her father takes a moment to respond, tight-lipped through his teeth. ‘All these questions, Lauren, you’re doin’ ma heid in.’

‘I just—’

‘Gies peace, all right? Christ sakes.’ When he speaks like this, a blade in his voice, Lauren knows she shouldn’t ask any more. He sits down in the armchair with a sigh and begins peeling a small stump of wood with a knife, shaping it like an owl. Lauren knows then that he can’t be too annoyed, because this owl will be for her. Vairi once told her that the Gaelic name for owl translates as ‘night-hag’. This is what she imagines when she hears them hooting in the dark. She will find this wooden night-hag sitting on her pillow when it’s finished.

‘There’s stew in the freezer. That rabbit.’ His eyes are sad. This is how he looks when he isn’t talking or listening, when he is in his own thoughts.

The young woman rises, followed by her shadow. Lauren’s father gets up to face her. His eyes still have a dreamy, glazed look in the firelight.

‘Look at you,’ he says to the woman. She doesn’t reply, but sits back down on the sofa, as silent as a moth. Niall shakes his head and goes into the leaking utility room to take the stew from the freezer. He begins to heat the icy lump in the metal saucepan. Usually they eat easy things: mashed potatoes, scrambled eggs, sausages. Sundays he might roast a chicken or stew a rabbit in the big pot. He calls this a batch. Through the hatch, Lauren watches him take another whisky bottle out of the cupboard.

Lauren’s dad’s rifle is propped outside the kitchen doorway. He uses it to shoot rabbit, pheasant and foxes. She has never seen the deaths herself, but she has heard the shot in the woods. She has seen the rabbit pelts and their unskinned bodies hanging in the garden and laid in the kitchen. She has touched their matted fur. Careful, her dad always tells her, ticks. Jameson eats their insides, the bad parts. He likes them, the same way that if he finds a dead animal in the forest he will roll on his back in it. Watching this woman, Lauren thinks of those animals and their bad parts.

Lauren’s father kneels in front of the woman, who does not meet his gaze. He tries to make her eat from a steaming bowl, holding the steel spoon to her mouth. He blows on the food and holds it to her again. The woman keeps her mouth shut. He tries a third time, the spoon at her closed mouth, her closed face.