Rohan closed the front door with a bang, leaving a shocked silence that reverberated through the house. I sat for a moment, with my head in my hands and my eyes half closed, and let my mind wander. Under my eyelids, I could see the kitchen as it used to be – before we coated its walls with glossy units and smothered the old lino floor with laminate; before we fitted the built-in appliances and the gleaming new oven.

It was all there: the foundations of the old Victorian house, as well as the transient energy of those who’d occupied it throughout the past century. If I concentrated hard enough, I could sometimes catch echoes of them; a snatch of the adults who’d lived and loved within these four walls; of the children who’d grown up here. Their breaths had brushed this very ceiling; had become a part of the fabric of the house. Their thoughts and emotions had impregnated the walls. To my mind, these people still existed, trapped in layers, like coats of paint, behind the cabinets and the shiny glass tiles.

In the hall, the grandfather clock we’d inherited with the house ticked off the seconds, each tick a textured drop of sound that swelled and burst, adding its own shape to the canvas of the house. My breathing slowed and, between my half-closed lids, I pictured the girl who’d lived here before slip into the kitchen, her hair in a ponytail, clean uniform on, ready for school. I watched as she poured cereal into a bowl, added milk, taking care not to spill it, closed the old pine-fronted fridge, and sat at the table to eat her breakfast. She was sweet, and I could tell by the pride she’d taken in her uniform that she was conscientious, too. She read while she ate: one of the thicker Harry Potter tomes. It was advanced for her age, which I took to be seven or eight today, and I smiled my admiration, proud like a mother – not that she’d see me, of course.

But this was no time for daydreaming. I pushed my chair out from under me with a scrape and stood, bringing our new kitchen back into focus. The heat was still stifling; the clock still ticked its metronomic beat; that lazy fly still circled. I picked up the fly swat that had taken up residence on the kitchen table since the heatwave began and gently swooshed until I could edge the fly back out to the garden and off away over the hedge. As my second coffee ran through the machine, I leaned on the counter and reopened the email on my phone. Not that I needed to read it again; already I knew it by heart.