She knows these streets, the houses that fail to pull their curtains at night, with their own families tucked up safe inside – on bad days it has felt to Chloe as if they are goading those like her, the ones on the other side of the glass. On good days she stares in, and it isn’t difficult to find something she envies. Tonight, though, she doesn’t need to linger; she’s tired and she wants to get home.

She turns the corner, and moments later her key is in the door. The house is still inside, just the shuffle of her footsteps moving on the Axminster carpet in the hall. Too tired to eat, she takes the stairs, pulling herself up on the rail installed for Nan.

She opens the door to her own room slowly, wincing as the carpet shifts underneath it. She can’t bear that voice calling out in the night for Stella, to ask again who Chloe is and why she is there. She needs one night of no questions, no explanations already made a hundred times before and instantly forgotten.

The next morning, Chloe finds Nan standing in the middle of the kitchen. Every cupboard door is open again, the contents cover the worktops – cans of rice pudding, dozens of them. She looks up and sees her.

‘Oh Chloe, dear, I’m glad you’re here, I can’t seem to find the teapot.’

It’s then she smells it, an odour of waxy burning plastic. She rushes into the kitchen in time to see the electric kettle begin to melt on the gas stove.

‘Nan!’

She opens the window, coughing, while Nan starts emptying more cupboards.

‘Nan, stop!’ she says. ‘We’ve got teabags. Sit down, I’ll make you a cuppa.’

‘Teabags?’ Nan says, shrugging. She wanders off into the living room.

Chloe cleans up the kitchen and boils a pan of water on the stove. She goes outside and dumps the burnt kettle in the bin on top of the last one.

She takes the cup of tea in to Nan in the living room and sits down beside her, fingers wrapped around her own warm mug.

‘Lovely,’ Nan says. ‘You look smart, where are you off to?’

‘Work, Nan.’

‘Remind me,’ she says, taking a sip, ‘where do you work?’

‘At the local newspaper.’

‘Oh, a reporter! That’s it.’

Chloe considers explaining the archive again, telling her of the cuttings system that the reporters rely on, of how she dissects the local newspaper each and every day, filing lives away into drawers. But instead she says, ‘Yeah, that’s right, Nan.’

‘Stella would have loved that.’

Chloe takes a sip of her own tea. Nan has buried Stella again while she slept. She’s better today. Chloe thinks of the missed calls from social services. She and Nan are managing just fine. They don’t need anyone else.