It turned out flocked wallpaper was a lot harder to get off than regular wallpaper. Nicole reasserted her conviction that she would never be the perpetrator of such a crime against renovation. After she’d spent four days stripping out the main bedroom, living room and hallway, she’d figured tackling the spare room would come easy. She was wrong. She’d struggled all morning and was only now starting to make progress.

As she scraped a small piece off she noticed something underneath. Not the plain old walls she’d uncovered in other parts of the cottage, but something patterned. She scraped another jagged strip off the wall. Yes. Beneath the flocked terror was another layer of wallpaper.

Surely this constituted crimes against humanity.

Nicole ran her fingers over the pattern. Small toy soldiers and building blocks – wallpaper for a child’s room.

But hadn’t Mandy said Ivy never had children? And that no one had been in the property since her passing? It must be from an earlier owner, Nicole figured.

Pushing through exhaustion, she worked all day to reveal the whole room, careful not to damage the second layer of paper. She stood in the middle of the room and stared at the walls. She was in no doubt that this had once been a nursery.

Nicole opened her laptop and Googled wallpaper, trying to get a sense of the age of the children’s pattern she’d uncovered. Thirty minutes of trawling through various websites left her no definitive answer, but from what she could tell, it was probably from the thirties or forties.

When did Ivy and Thomas arrive?

Questions swirled through Nicole’s mind as she paced the kitchen floor. There were, potentially, answers right here within her grasp. Right inside that cupboard in the corner where she’d shoved Ivy’s box.

She edged towards the cupboard door, and retreated back again. No. She couldn’t.

Nicole wasn’t sure if she believed in fate or signs. She wasn’t sure what she believed in anymore at all. But she couldn’t ignore the fact she’d found the box and that echoes of Ivy and Thomas seemed to be shadowing her – the initials carved into the bench, the ones over the fireplace.

Maybe she could just take a peek.

She pulled the box out of the cupboard and sat it on the table. She took a step back, then inched towards it again and sat down.

She pulled out the letters and undid the yellow ribbon that tied them together. She broke the wax seal of the first letter, the cracking sound sending a shudder of guilt through her as she ripped into this woman’s private life.

11th January, 1941

My Dearest Tom,