Carrie joins me when I’m contemplating the contents of the fridge, wondering whether my stomach might consider scrambled eggs a good or bad idea. “Morning,” she says. She seems suspiciously bright in comparison to yesterday; perhaps the shower has woken her up. “I thought you were going to sleep in?”

“Morning. There’s some coffee on the table for you.” I close the fridge door and stifle a yawn. I don’t think I’m quite ready for eggs. “You slept through quite an eventful night.”

“What do you mean?” She glances round from filling the kettle at the sink.

“I got woken at 3 A.M. by the smoke alarm going off.” I gesture up at the ceiling. “This one. Quite the racket it made. It turns out the unit was full of flies. God, it was horrible. They must have been nesting in there or something. Cluster flies do that, I think, or maybe they were a different variety . . . They were everywhere. They got in my hair, my clothes . . .” I’m shuddering. Carrie is staring at me, openmouthed. Then she looks around, as if searching for evidence. “I cleaned it all up. Didn’t you wonder why the smoke alarm cover was off?”

“What are you talking about?”

“The cover. I left it on the table.”

“This is the first time I’ve been in the kitchen this morning.”

“But . . .” I stop talking and look at the back door. There should be a black bin bag there full of a day or two of trash topped off with fly carcasses, knotted at the top to stop any creatures that somehow survived my chemical assault from escaping. “Did you take out the bin bag?”

“No, I told you, this is the first time I’ve been in here this morning. What’s going on?”

“I don’t . . . I don’t know.” I’m opening the cupboard under the sink. There’s no insect spray there. Where did I put that?

“Did you have some kind of weird dream or something?”

“No!” She recoils at my tone, and I stop myself, then go on less vehemently. “No. It happened. Feel, my hair is damp. I had to take a shower afterward, to wash off all the . . .” I shudder again. She reaches out a hand and scrunches a handful of my hair. “See? Damp.”

“Yes.” I can’t read anything in her gray eyes.

“Someone must have been in here.”

“Maybe. Or—”

“Or what? You think I took a shower in my sleep?”

Carrie shrugs. “It doesn’t sound any stranger than your version, which has me sleeping through a smoke alarm, and disappearing bin bags,” she says flatly.

“You’d been drinking and you wear earplugs in bed.” My words are level, but I’m not attempting to keep the bite out of them.

“Even so.” She isn’t backing down. “And wouldn’t you have woken me anyway?”