I exhale slowly, try to expunge his voice from my mind. I have to keep busy, I tell myself, or I’ll drive myself mad. I bend down and pick up last night’s empty crisp packets and sausage roll wrappers and put them into the carrier bag. Tying the handles together, I step quietly out of the room and head to the kitchen.

My dad used to say that things always looked better in the daytime, that the sunrise brought answers to problems that seemed insurmountable in the middle of the night. I think of his words as I step into the kitchen that, in the morning light, doesn’t seem quite so terrifying. I put the bag of rubbish on to the table then take a good look around. There are jagged wooden shelves running along the wall that look like they’ve been fashioned out of an old tree branch. Like the mantelpiece, they are laden with clutter. There’s an assortment of tins and boxes, old candles, paintbrushes and more bottles of antiseptic. I see the words ‘Powdered Milk’ written on the front of one of the tins. Taking it down, I read the label: ‘Best Before 01/08/2003’. Fifteen years out of date. My stomach twists as I look at that year. The year of my dad’s death. That’s the second time I’ve been confronted with it since I arrived here. It seems to be mocking me.

‘Don’t let the dark thoughts in,’ I mutter to myself as I put the tin back on to the shelf. ‘Keep focused and clear.’ I make my way to the back of the kitchen where the odd contraption I noticed yesterday sits. I realize it must be a stove, though it juts out at all angles, like someone’s cobbled it together from bits of old scrap. There’s a flue with a ledge running across the bottom on which sit a black cast-iron kettle, a two-handled heavy-set cooking pot and an old-fashioned iron. There is a door in the bottom that I presume is where the wood goes but when I try to open it I find it’s wedged shut with grease.

I take a deep breath and try to contemplate living in this place over the winter with no form of heating. I’ve got to get that stove to work. But how the hell do I do that? As I stand looking at it I hear Mark’s voice in my head again, what he said to me the night we had Beth and Harry over for dinner. I was pregnant with Joe and suffering badly with morning sickness. Mark had invited our friends over at short notice. I usually wouldn’t have minded. I’d known Beth since I was eighteen. We’d met during the first term at university and had quickly become inseparable. Back then I was a bit of a party girl, always up for a glass of wine and a night of clubbing. To outsiders I must have looked like I didn’t have a care in the world but Beth soon saw through that. One night, over a bottle of Merlot in the cheap Italian bistro that served plates of pasta for five quid, I told her about my dad’s death and she opened up about losing her mum to cancer when she was five. We swapped our sob stories and formed a bond that remained unshakeable for two years. Then I met Mark and the friendship took a back seat. I could tell Beth didn’t like him but I told myself she was envious, that the fact I’d found someone as attentive as Mark while she worked her way through a series of one-night stands trying to find the ‘one’ had made her resent me. How wrong I was. I remember her face that night as she sat watching Mark criticize me. She knew. She’d known all along. Why hadn’t I listened to her?