When Dylan got more into the gaming, the old man introduced a rule about computer time having to be earned. Catching Dylan out once – playing Sea of Thieves instead of reading up on the grisly atrocities of Stalin, as he had claimed – the old man, without a word, had unplugged every phone cable in the cottage. Dylan’s screen had gone blank mid-game. He had thought about leaving then all right, but had stayed for one more day, which had become two, and then three, until he’d stopped counting. He had been a couple of weeks in at the time, with Lily’s postcard plan under way, making him feel better, just as she’d said it would. When he’d told his grandfather about them, the old man had guffawed so heartily it had turned into one of those coughing fits where Dylan had to fetch water and pat him on the back.

Dylan was upstairs, lying on the bed in the room he knew had once been his father’s, when he heard the faint rumble of an approaching vehicle. The cottage was so remote that he assumed it was Iris, or the nearest farmer, who sometimes came looking for escaped sheep.

He returned his attention to his laptop, holding out for a return of the broadband signal, so that he could send a response to Zee. He wanted to write to Lily too, whose pleas that he come back for Christmas had grown more and more desperate. He wanted to explain how it wouldn’t have felt right to take off and leave the old man at such a time; although, a few hours into Christmas Eve now, with all the tasks Dylan could think of already done, including hanging a handful of ancient, chipped baubles on the smallest fir tree he had ever laid eyes on, it was starting to feel like being away from home over Christmas might be a bigger deal than he’d anticipated. It didn’t help that his bedroom was even more arctic than usual, because the radiator was the one that collected all the air in the house, his grandfather had explained, when Dylan had finally dared to complain. He had been given a little key to ‘bleed’ the air out of it with, which he had lost.