‘I’m so hungry,’ he says. He places the bowl by the armchair and sits with Lauren at the wooden table in the kitchen and they eat together without speaking. There is comfort in the stew. Lauren looks up. The grey bristle of her father’s jaw is working away, while his shoulders and head, with its blond and white ponytail, tower over the bowl. His hands are big and coarse from making things, mending fences and hewing posts, hitting them into the earth, unrolling chicken wire. He builds things for inside the house too. Chairs, boxes and shelves made from wood from a further part of the forest, which he collects from the sawmill. On his forearm is a tattoo of a blue rose.

When the fire starts to take, he holds the woman’s hand and leads her up to the chest of drawers in his bedroom. The temperature is colder up here. He takes out his black Motörhead T-shirt with flames on the back and tucks it under his arm. Lauren watches the woman shake with cold. Lauren pulls the tartan blanket from her father’s bed and wraps it around herself. He has not switched on a light.

Niall leads the woman to the bathroom and locks the door. They are in the bathroom for a long time. Lauren hears water running. She wants hot water too and the lounge fire. She presses her ear to the bathroom door and hears her father’s low voice, singing something.

‘Dad, can I help?’

‘No, love. Out in a sec.’

Lauren walks slowly along the dingy landing clutching the blanket like a toga. Her pumpkin bucket bangs against her knee. The house is never fully bright apart from the skylight over the staircase. A royal-blue carpet covers the floors throughout, including the damp bathroom. Net curtains veil the small windows and heavy velvet covers the entrance to the back room. Unopened letters clutter the spindly table in the hallway. The walls are clad in a deep-yellow pine. There are a few pictures of hilly landscapes, icy rivers and wild animals painted in soft, fantasy colours.

Lauren listens hard but only hears the drip downstairs in the utility room, nothing more. Droplets of water are falling from the roof into a red bucket that her dad put out the day before. He says he will fix it tomorrow. Outside the wind grows thick and it starts to rain. In her bedroom, there are outlines of horses on the walls, pages carefully torn from magazines. Dreamcatchers hang on her curtain rail, their feathers heavy.