She turns the water off and dries herself with a towel. Once she’s put on her bathrobe, she opens the bathroom door to allow the steam to escape; it rushes out onto the landing, curling towards Maureen and Patrick’s bedroom. Chloe watches it in the mirror on the bathroom cabinet. She stops still, listening carefully for any noise from downstairs, and hears the sound of the sewing machine going. She gently pulls the cabinet door open. Inside, the usual medical remedies are stowed away neatly: indigestion tablets and ibuprofen pain relief gel, spare tubes of toothpaste and extra toothbrushes, and four different bottles of prescription medicine, each with Maureen’s name printed on them. One is out of date, the label faded, with only one or two tablets left inside the bottle, so Chloe puts that back on the shelf, but the other three were prescribed just ten days before Chloe arrived. She picks these up, one at a time. Diazepam she has heard of – isn’t that some kind of sleeping pill? But the other two, sertraline and mirtazapine, she’s not so sure about. Why would Maureen need all of these? Listening out again, the gentle hum of the machine gives her the cover she needs. She quickly returns to her room and grabs the pale blue notebook that she’s not yet replaced in her black shoebox. She hurries along the landing back to the bathroom and quickly scribbles down the name and dosage of each pill alongside her other notes. She’s concentrating so hard on the spelling of each that she only realizes the sewing machine has stopped downstairs when she hears Maureen’s footsteps on the tread of the stairs. Chloe quickly pushes the bottles back into the cupboard and shuts the door just in time to see the top of Maureen’s head as she reaches the landing. She shoves her notebook inside her bathrobe, tucking it between her bare skin and her sleeved elbow, and desperately tries to rearrange herself into someone who looks less guilty.

‘You’re having a slower morning today,’ Maureen says as she appears on the landing. ‘Ooh, those stairs, they don’t get any easier, do they?’

‘Oh, it’s my boss, she’s in a bit later this morning so I don’t think anyone would mind if I . . . well, you know?’ Now Chloe is aware of herself panting a little. As a distraction she grabs her pink hairbrush and starts pulling it through her hair, stumbling on a particularly stubborn knot. Maureen watches her from the landing and sees how she struggles. She steps forward.

‘May I?’ Maureen says. She holds out her hand, and Chloe hesitates for a second, knowing that just inches from her nose those bottles of pills may be standing in a haphazard fashion behind the small mirrored door – had she even remembered to put them back where she found them in her panic?

‘Oh, yeah, sure,’ Chloe says.