He parked in a space by the old church, and walked back along the road to the little cottage he’d shared with Cynthia Hughes. He let himself in, and was immediately greeted by the musty smell of a house that hadn’t seen a living person for months. The place was still and silent. Cynthia’s rosy face, constant humming of show tunes, and the smell of her baking had been absent since she’d passed away at the end of his first year at Oxford. He’d spent the summer straightening out her affairs and coming to terms with the fact he was utterly alone. Tears and self-pity had been his only companions that bleak, rainy summer, but as he’d started his second year, the pain of her passing had faded.

He still didn’t like to come home, though. He hadn’t cleared the house, and there were reminders of Cynthia everywhere. The tacky, kitten-festooned ‘Home Sweet Home’ sign by the front door, the collection of Edwardian china figurines, the family photos of Cynthia as a child with her older brother and parents. Elliot passed the mementos of his guardian’s life and went into the kitchen to reclaim a set of keys from the odds-and-ends drawer.

Minutes later, he was on the road again, this time heading for a house that had once been full of love and laughter, but was now associated with loss and suffering. The dark clouds that had been spitting mockingly all morning finally threw down their worst, and the roads were coated with a slick wash of heavy rain. This was how Elliot remembered Longhaven, the cottage where his mother had become sick with cancer, where he’d received news of his father’s death, the place that had been his home until he was ten. There had been happy times, bright moments with the parents he longed for every single day of his life. But those happy memories had been overwhelmed by a fog of misery.

Time was friend and foe. The years had made his suffering fainter, so he didn’t feel as though he would immediately cry at the thought of his mother and father, but equally, the passage of time was the enemy of memory. He used to recall exactly how his mum smelled, and what her hair felt like when she hugged him. He used to be able to remember the flush of contentment he’d experience whenever she smiled at him. When he was younger, he could recall the sound of his father’s voice, the smell of his aftershave when he carried Elliot upstairs to bed. Now those details were gone, and his absent parents were just ideas, vague ghosts that haunted his memory. He tried to clasp specific moments, like the night his father had given him his mother’s necklace, but his mind was fallible, and he was afraid it would eventually fail his parents and forget them altogether, and that was a prospect he simply couldn’t bear.

Elliot turned onto Ash Ridge, the winding lane that led to Longhaven, and he followed it through the wild open countryside that stretched from the foot of Hen Cloud, the inland cliff formation that had sparked his imagination as a child. His father had often used the gritstone towers that loomed above their family home as inspiration for stories, but like the memories of his parents, the details of those tales were lost and all Elliot recalled were vague snippets of pirates and dragons lurking in hidden caves.