Downstairs, the house looked different in the dark, a hundred LED eyes watching me as I moved through the silent, tidy rooms. A show home was how he wanted it, not a real place where people lived. I couldn’t imagine a baby messing up this space, and yet I could feel it inside me, growing day by day however much I denied it.

Suddenly, I became aware that I could hear something. Music again, but soft this time. The speaker. Some kind of lullaby, Brahms’s maybe. Had I set this? Was there some button, some automatic setting that did all this? I didn’t remember pushing it if so.

Suddenly, I thought back to the day before. The mad idea I’d had, that you could be there watching me, from the trees. It made no sense. Why would you disappear but leave me signs like this? I must have done it myself. But how? I went to the console, trying to turn it off – I barely knew how to work the thing. As the music stopped, I almost passed out at the sound of my name. ‘Suzi. Suzi.’ A soft whisper in the air.

What the hell? I looked around me wildly; where had it come from? It sounded like the corner of the kitchen, but there was no one there. Was it the speaker talking to me, an electronic voice? I stabbed at the thing, the green light bathing my face, hands shaking. Just some setting I didn’t know about, some malfunction maybe, but all the same I found myself making a circuit of the house, testing every door and window. I wished we’d never got all this technology. Somehow, it just made me realise how alone I was.

Nora

Nora

I was worried, after what I said to her at the old house, that I’d scared Suzi off. Shown her too much of my real face, under the mask. It had been instinctive. I’d wanted to shout at her, tell her she couldn’t just walk on to someone else’s property and take things – I’d seen her inspecting the vegetables, slipping herbs into her pockets, and I had wanted for a second to slap her. But of course she knew nothing, probably didn’t even understand the laws of trespass. A city girl.