‘No,’ said Chris, ‘not if you don’t want to.’

‘Cool,’ said Maude. She slid the lid carefully onto the shoebox before turning her attention to the biscuit tin by the kettle.

*

She left them to it, her dad and Nell in the kitchen. She took her handful of biscuits up to the attic, got out her sketch pad and her books and settled herself on her bunk. She’d brought the books up from the living room. Nell and her dad wouldn’t mind, they loved to see her doing something normal like reading, something safe.

The books were quite old, leather bound with their titles stamped in gold letters down their spines. Maude suspected that half the reason they were kept in the house was because they looked good all bundled up together, but they were interesting too. There were lots of myths and legends mixed in with the historic stuff, even if it was hard to tell things apart some-times, and she wondered if she might find out about the drying ground and why it felt so funny there, or maybe something about the shoe.

She wished she could bring it up to her room, and was briefly resentful that she wasn’t allowed to keep it close by, as if she couldn’t be trusted, as if she was a little kid.

She’d had a nice day with her dad, though. They’d gone to a pub for lunch and that had only been spoilt a bit by him being on his phone half the time. It was funny really, as if she was the grown-up and he was the irritating kid who couldn’t leave his mobile alone.

There had been one quite long call he’d wandered off to take, leaving her all on her own at their table – she wasn’t sure who that had been, but her dad had looked guilty when he had finally come back.

‘Don’t tell Nell,’ he’d said, and she’d liked that feeling, the sense that it was just the two of them against the world, against her.

She’d tried asking him about the house as they were on their way back. The sea dipping in and out of view as they drove home along the coast road. ‘Is it very old, then?’

‘Yeah.’

‘How old?’

‘I’m not sure, to be honest.’

‘Can we look? Online?’

‘Maybe.’

The closer they’d got to the house, the quieter he’d got, as if his mind was drifting back to boring stuff, back to Nell. But it had been good until then, just the two of them. They liked the same things, they laughed at the same jokes; they didn’t need anyone else.