‘Do you remember when Mili was pregnant?’ Meena asked and I closed my eyes to hide an eye-roll: dear God, here we go again. We all knew the story she was about to tell: it was family lore, along with the time when she left a newsagent’s moments before it was held up by armed robbers. ‘She hadn’t done the pregnancy test,’ Meena said, ‘but I guessed she was expecting because I felt the extra aura in the room.’

She touched her hand to her chest. ‘I can feel something again now,’ she said. ‘I always told Rohan not to buy an old house, but he wouldn’t listen, would he? Hmm? You never know what’s happened in a house like this. All the people who lived here. All the people died right here, within these walls.’ She shuddered. ‘Under this roof. All that energy.’ She stared into the middle distance again, as if she could see through time.

‘Energy never dies,’ she said to the kitchen, and her voice took on a trance-like tone, as if she were speaking to spirits themselves. ‘It might change form, but it never dies. Sometimes it gets trapped.’ She turned and looked meaningfully at me. ‘You sit here all day, alone, painting, Abigail. You open your brain, your heart and your soul to forces we can’t see or understand. You receive instruction from another plane. And this is how it works – this is how the good paintings come to you…’ My hackles rose at that. Did my mother-in-law really think I had zero talent without the input of some extra-terrestrial energy? ‘But sometimes things you don’t want will come in, too.’

Meena’s nail fretted at the surface of the table, the oak distressed by a designer rather than years of use, and she sucked in her cheeks. I picked up my water and took another sip to hide my impatience. I would never admit it to her, but I felt the energy, too. I felt the shell of the house pulsing with it: it was the energy that had made me want to buy the house in the first place. I knew that the house wanted me here. It had chosen me – but I would rather pull out my own fingernails than tell Meena that.

‘I have a very strong feeling about this place,’ Meena continued. ‘There’s unhappiness here. Something bad.’

I knew her well enough to know what she was picturing: something dark and brooding that skirted the house, breathing on us all, wisping its way around us and inside us like a macabre fog; something too ethereal to put into words. If I wasn’t careful, she’d be here before I knew it with a group of friends burning sage and chanting, and I didn’t even have Rohan here to stop her. I snapped to attention.