When Lauren finally comes home from Billy’s in the dark, her dad is gone. She takes the wet sheets from the dark line and puts them back in the washing machine. They smell awful, or maybe it’s the utility room. She pushes back the unsettling feeling that brushes the hairs on her arms and the back of her neck and stays still, listening. The house feels untrustworthy. She wonders what her dad might be doing and if the woman is hiding somewhere still. They don’t have an attic or a basement. She has searched all the rooms, or all the rooms she can open.

Whenever Lauren feels scared in the dark, she lets it wrap around her, opening up her other senses until she becomes part of it, moving as silently as she can. She creeps to the stone hearth and sweeps out the grey ash into a dustpan. Then she piles the fire with kindling, as she often does when her father is out in the evening, laying down a piece of firelighter with half a peat block and striking a match. A burnt match is one of Lauren’s favourite things and she breathes it in, wafting the stick around with its thin trail of smoke. She wants to feel protected.

As the fire takes hold, she grabs the apple she took earlier from Billy’s house and forest birch twigs from her pocket and scatters the pieces of wood out in front of her, with a few dry leaves. She lays the apple on the stone hearth and cuts across its circumference, splitting through the core, pressing down hard on her pocketknife with the heel of her hand. She opens the two halves, revealing a five-pointed star shape in the middle of each. She flicks the seeds on to the floor with the tip of the knife and takes a stubby pencil from the table. She draws a question mark on to the curled strip of birch skin, then throws these birch pieces into the fire, whispering:

‘Birch in the fire goes.

Tell me what the Lady knows.’

She watches them crackle and dance, then throws the apple seeds into the fire. They pop in the flames and she loses her thoughts to the heat.

When the flames die to embers she feels warm and safe in the dark house. The numbness in the walls has gone. She chops up the browning apple in the kitchen and puts the pieces on a plate with a blob of peanut butter.

She begins moving between rooms, switching on the lights, another ritual she saves for when she is alone. The only door she cannot open is the one to the locked room, by the front door.