She rose from her seat woozily and gestured for me to follow her across the room to the hallway. Maren staggered forward, both hands against the walls of the hallway to steady herself. Fear zipped down my spine like someone had chucked a pint of cold water down the back of my shirt. What if Tom found us creeping about the house in the dead of night? Maren had the grace of a rhino on stilettos. She took to the stairs, lumbering down towards the kitchen. No, not the kitchen – Tom’s office. I followed her inside as she flicked on the light.

She reached for something on top of a filing cabinet in the corner. She hefted it down, almost dropping it. I reached it and helped her lower it to the floor.

‘This was Basecamp,’ she explained. I could make out that the model – a beautiful 3D printed model – replicated the woods and the cliff, with a piece of shiny blue plastic for the fjord and a painted strip of blue for the river. A ladder seemed to stretch down from the house along the rock face to the bottom of the fjord, where a small beach was marked out with smooth plastic.

‘They’d pretty much finished it, too. Aurelia loved it. Basecamp was her house. Tom wanted something more – what does he say? Oh yes, innovative. Aurelia had wanted a more traditional Norwegian wooden house that sat on top of the cliff overlooking the fjord, so that’s what they built.’

‘And what happened?’

Maren sighed. ‘Tom diverted the river, and when a storm hit, the river wrecked the foundations. They had to start all over again.’

She glanced at the wooden easel, on which sat a large, hand-drawn charcoal sketch of what looked like a pod hanging off the side of something. It was only when I made out the trees that I realized the right-angled shape was meant to be the cliff, and that the pod was a structure that was half in, half outside the rock face.

‘That’s the new house,’ she said, seeing that I was questioning the pod structure. ‘I know what you’re thinking. What kind of a house is that? Well, if you take your first idea of what a house is, then toss it into a blender with some fairy dust and a handful of crazy, you get this. He even calls it “Aurelia’s nest”.’

‘That’s unfortunate,’ I said, my thoughts cartwheeling to ‘The Eagle’s Nest’, Hitler’s gaff in the Bavarian Alps, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, where Jack Nicholson gets lobotomized. Evidently Tom had overlooked the less salubrious connotations of the word ‘nest’.

‘Or perhaps he knew very well what he was doing when he called it that.’