She scanned the living room but there was no sign of him. She turned to leave, then hesitated, looking back into the room. Something was different, but she couldn’t pick it right away. A plasma screen and the spines of dozens of old DVDs and Blu-rays looked back at her from the large entertainment unit against one wall, opposite the fireplace. The three-piece sofa set was just as she remembered, as was the furry blue rug that Mia liked to stretch out on to watch TV. But something was different. She was sure of it.

Then, it struck her. The far right corner of the living room had always been marked with dozens of people’s names and heights. They had inherited the wall with the house, and all the names along with it. It wasn’t just John, but John’s cousins and friends. As soon as Mia was old enough, John had marked her height each summer, and each summer Mia had marvelled at how much she’d grown. Two years ago, Mia had insisted Kate finally join the wall, and she had done so, proudly. But now, all the names and heights were gone. The wall was eggshell white, just like the rest of the room. It was as if she’d wandered into a parallel universe where everything was identical except for this one small, seemingly trivial detail.

Kate dabbed her finger on the new paintjob: it was still slightly damp.

‘What have you been doing out here, John?’ she whispered.

She left the room quickly, feeling spooked, and climbed the stairs to check the master bedroom. They had stripped the bed at the end of their last holiday, but it had since been roughly made. There was an unnatural yellow tint to the room; dull afternoon sunlight fell in through the curtains. It made the scene feel like a memory she wanted to walk into. If this were a movie, a flashback might have shown her and John lying in bed, spooning, making love or reading the Sunday papers.

On the other side of the bed, below the window, she found John’s suitcase. She knelt, unzipped it. All the clothing she had thought he packed for London was there, washed and neatly folded. Trousers, shirts, socks, underwear and toiletries case. There was a black leather notebook wedged in a transparent compartment in the lid of the case. She took it out and leafed through the pages.

It was full of drawings. Kate immediately recognised John’s untrained, slightly childish drawing style: lots of uneven narrow lines, hatched shading and muddled perspectives. But up until that point she’d only ever seen his doodles in the margins of the Sunday newspaper, little houses and transparent cubes. She had never seen him draw anything like this.