“Freya? Are you there? I’m sorry to go on about this fish pie.”

I talked competently about fish pie while I watched the man cross the road and disappear into a side street. The clouds muttered over the town and I shivered in the thunderous light. I hadn’t asked for directions to Byrne Hall. I wasn’t even sure he’d recognised me from the wedding. I wondered what he’d done to his arm, and when, and why.

“Was that thunder?” Dad said. “Are you far from your B&B?”

“Not far.”

I turned in the direction of the harbour, where it seemed safe to assume I’d find the Harbour View Guest House, but my eye was drawn upward, over the clustered masts, across the swing bridge, into the wooded hills. There it was; there was Byrne Hall. Impossible to mistake the graceful white house with its pillared porch, and the tiered garden tumbling down through the trees like a wide green river.

“I’ll love you and leave you,” Dad was saying. “Drop me a quick text once you’ve settled in.”

I nearly missed the entrance to the drive. It was only because I stopped to shake a stone from my shoe that I noticed two mossy gateposts, half hidden in the undergrowth. On top of each post there was a stone raven—one headless; both badly pocked and weather stained—and to one side, underneath a fringe of ivy, a shabby sign that read, BYRNE HALL. NO TRESPASSING.

Ravens on the gateposts and an encroaching thunderstorm: Stella would have laughed. I would have laughed, too, if I hadn’t been alone.

The thunder sounded strange, like a bass note coming up out of the earth, and nothing to do with the sky at all. The trees that arched over the driveway met in the middle, so I was protected from the rain when it began spotting the leaves with fat, heavy drops. The faster the rain fell, the darker and cooler it got under all that greenery, but my jacket was in my suitcase, and I’d left my suitcase by the gate.

It seemed silly to turn back when the snaking lane kept luring me around another corner, and another, until the house began to appear through the trees in flashes of white and the woods began to thin, giving way to shrubberies and lawns. I kept imagining I was being followed, and with every little noise—the snap of a twig, the chuck-chuck of a pheasant, the clatter of wings in a beech tree—I would turn and wait a moment, half hopeful, half afraid, just to be sure.

What of the family that occupied Byrne Hall? What would they make of me and my questions? I hadn’t given enough thought to that; I’d spent too much time fantasising that the house would be vacant. It was a long shot—I knew it was a long shot—but what if the owners were away? What if they only lived at Byrne Hall now and then? It was August, after all—holiday season—and it had looked pretty empty the other weekend, despite all the fuss about privacy. It hadn’t felt like a home. What if I could sneak inside and have the emptiness to myself for one night—maybe two? I could picture myself so clearly in a high-ceilinged bedroom facing the garden, my notebooks spread out on the floor. There would be dust dancing in a shaft of sunlight, and the sound of the sea outside my window, and words would find me in the stillness, the way they always used to do.