He disappeared again in the early hours. I reached for him in my sleep, but the duvet was turned back at the corner and the mattress was cold. I sat up with a lurch and hoisted the covers up to my chin.

I wasn’t afraid. The house was ours now. The worst of its mysteries had fallen away like veils, one by one, and there was nothing left to trouble us. Nobody to listen out for, or hide from, or suspect. Lady Caroline’s faded eyes were not alive. Diana was in good hands somewhere else. Stella had never set foot inside the door. Cory Byrne needed me.

Cory needed me. I lay down and sure enough he came back, soft-footed as a thief. I didn’t let him know I was awake; I just watched him wandering round the studio, peering at the drawings on the walls and pausing at the easel. The wedding party had broken up and the gardens were quiet, but the fairy lights were still on and our bedroom shadows were speckled with colour.

I think he stopped in front of every single drawing. He had a crayon or a charcoal stick tucked behind his ear, and occasionally he’d lean in to add an extra line or a patch of shade. Sometimes he made no adjustments, but just touched the drawings with his fingertips, caressing them as if they were made of warm skin instead of paper.

I breathed sleepily and only my eyes moved under their half-closed lids, following his fingers over all those static faces and bodies. In the daylight their fleshy lips and shoulders put me on edge, but it was easy to like them in the semidarkness. It was easy to think of them as me.

October 2005

“I’m sure we’ll find her in Cromer,” I say, yet again.

“I’m not.” Dad grinds the gears on the rental car, as if he’d rather fight it than drive it.

I am sitting on the edge of the passenger seat with a map across my knees. It’s not as if we don’t know the way—we’ve driven to the Norfolk coast every summer since I was born—but because it’s October, and because our motives are anxious, it feels like new terrain.

I am confident that we will find Stella here. I had a few moments of doubt about two hours into the drive, but after a while Dad noticed I was crying and I felt his eyes flitting between the road and my turned-away face. It’s not that he said or did anything irritable, but I know he was thinking, Please, I don’t need another drama queen, and actually that helped me to get over it. I’m fine now.