It was a nice fantasy, walking in the frosty woods, the dog’s barks echoing in the silence. That you might be just around the corner, not gone from me. We made our way up to the house, and I began to look around. You could sometimes find things growing in the kitchen gardens. I’d brought a squash home to Nick once. ‘Look! Foraging!’

‘I don’t know,’ he’d said. ‘Someone might get cross.’

‘Er, who? It’s not like a hotel chain are going to bother if I take a few bits of veg.’

It was the kind of fake-rebel act that Nick would have once said he loved about me. Funny how the things people love at first are the things they end up hating.

I had a look about the kitchen beds, while Nora went on ahead to inspect the ruined house. The greenhouses had cracks in the glass and missing panes, tools left about as if abandoned in a hurry. I found what I thought was rosemary poking through in one bed and rubbed it between my fingers, releasing the sweet smell. I ripped up a few stalks of it and put them in the pocket of my coat. There wasn’t anything else, though I could see what looked like root vegetables coming through.

I wandered up to the house, the windows gaping blind, birds rustling in the walls. It was all impossibly romantic, Rebecca and Jane Eyre rolled into one. I peered into one of the windows, expecting to see it as usual, littered in ivy and branches and bird droppings, the floorboards rotting away.

Someone was there.

I staggered back – was it you? Come to find me? No, of course it was just Nora, standing still in the middle of a room, looking up at the sky.

‘Nora!’ I called, trying to hide the fear in my voice. ‘You scared me.’

I could hear her feet crunching on fallen branches. I wondered how she’d got in. The door was usually shut, though I’d never tried it. Or perhaps she’d hopped through a window.

She was staring me in the face through the ruined wall. She seemed different – not as warm as on the afternoon I’d spent in her home, drinking tea, sharing confidences. Then she bent her head back, looking at the lid of the sky, white and flat. ‘Do you know The Tempest?’

‘Er . . . a little. From school.’

She said something that must have been a quote. ‘The bit about the cloven pine . . . I always thought that a horrible image, don’t you think? Trapped for ever. Looking up at a little bit of sky.’

I said nothing. My hands were cold and shaking, so I shoved them into my pockets.