When she gets into bed, she reaches down into the gap by the corner of the wall and brings out a small drawstring bag and an old battered notebook. The bag is printed with gold stars on midnight-blue velvet. There is a tarot deck inside. In the evenings she will often shuffle the cards, unwieldy in her small hands. She tries to read and learn the cards as best she can, but sometimes she dreams up the meanings when she doesn’t understand. On the first page of the leather-bound notebook it says SPAEWIFE’S BEUK. This is a book she found in the bottom compartment of her mother’s vanity case. She soon learned it tells secrets and explains powers.

Some of its yellowed pages are covered in scrawls made by her grandmother, her mother’s mother, who wrote her name inside the front cover. Others are written in a more old-fashioned script. Others again are written in bold, curvy letters that look friendlier to her, like a teacher’s writing. Some of the pages have been taken from jotters and glued or Sellotaped into the book. Many are dedicated to the reading of cards, with illustrations and diagrams.

She is too tired to try and concentrate on the deck, so she flicks through the pages of the book to see what she might find. Someone has sketched out pentangles, clubs, wands, an overflowing goblet and a dove and, in one beautiful illustration, a blindfolded woman crossing sharp swords.

Next to the notebook on her pillow is a thumb-sized box of worry dolls that she talks to each night. She has given them names. She takes them out of the box and lines them up against one side of her pillow. Stacey. Crystal. Spencer. Kendall. Silently, she communicates to each, asking them to keep her and her father safe as she places them under her pillow.

Her breathing is shallow against the heavy rain outside. She remembers she is wearing her mother’s lipstick and goes back along the landing to the bathroom. It is empty. ‘Dad?’ she calls out. There is no answer. She feels cold, so she runs the hot tap over her palms and wrists and touches her neck with her warm hands. In the dim light she sees tiny smears of blood in the sink. She is not sure for a moment whether there was a lot more and she has been washing it away. Sometimes when Lauren brushes her teeth she spits out blood, but this is not the same. She tries to wipe the smears away and, in the gloom, wonders if they were ever there to begin with.