Cory has only gone to town for groceries, but she misses him as if he’s gone to boarding school again, or college. As if he’s dead. Oh, how she misses him! She presses her nose against the rain-speckled glass and murmurs prayers for his safe return. If it weren’t for her illness she would do all the household chores. Cory shouldn’t be wheeling a trolley up and down supermarket aisles; he has better, brighter things to be getting on with. Diana conceives of these “better, brighter things” in the vaguest possible way. She doesn’t mean the wedding venue business, even if it is their only source of income at present.

She clutches at the handle of her walking stick and knocks her forehead against the glass. The moment she spots him coming up the drive she will turn away from this window, with its unkind reflections, and pretend she’s been relaxing on the sofa.

Diana avoids mirrors as much as possible. It’s horrible, seeing herself so changed—especially the hair. The hair breaks her heart. She touches a streak of naked scalp: first in the glass, then on her actual head. When Cory was little he’d wait for his father to leave the house in the morning, before padding along to her room in pyjamas and slippers. He’d sit on her knee at the dressing table—sleepy eyed and milky skinned—stroking her hair with the silver-backed brush, twisting it round his fingers, patting it down, wrapping it round his own neck like a silky scarf.

She often remembers those mornings—the slamming of the front door; the starting of the car and its fading down the drive; Cory’s slippered feet along the corridor. The two of them would place kisses—tiny, birdlike pecks—on one another’s bruises, as if that were an amusing thing to do. As if it were a funny game they wouldn’t have missed for the world.

Diana squeezes her eyes shut against the pain and breathes through clenched teeth. Come home, Cory. Never mind bread and tinned soup and wine—or whatever it is he thinks they need. Never mind tablets from the chemist, which make no odds anyway. Come home, my dove, my darling.

When Diana opens her eyes, there’s someone on the edge of the woods, but the “Thank you, God” dies on her lips. She backs away from the window, opens her dry mouth, tries to call out, remembers she’s alone in the house.

The red-haired girl shoulders her bag and starts walking across the gravel.

It’s good that I’m alone, Diana thinks. It’s for the best. We can deal with this invasion together, the house and I. We can sort it out before Cory gets back.

A moment later the girl is banging on the door and shouting, “Hello?”

“Hello.” Diana’s reply mists the window. She thought she was perfectly at home with fear, but this is different.

The pain roars when she moves, but move she must. The house laughs in its lugubrious fashion—like wind tumbling down a chimney—as Diana grunts her way across the hall to the front door. “I hear you,” she mutters, because after all these years it doesn’t seem strange to talk to Byrne Hall. “Don’t you laugh at me.”