As she is sitting there, imagining morning breakfast conversations and midnight snacks, she hears it. A low moan, the sound an injured animal would make. Katriina goes to the window and peers out into the backyard, where she can see nothing but a breeze swaying through the trees. She flicks on the kitchen light and stands motionless in the doorway, leaning forward, as though this will somehow help her hear more clearly. She hears the cry again, feral and anguished, coming from upstairs. Katriina tiptoes through the hallway, avoiding the spots on the floor that she knows to be creaky, hoping that she can be stealthy enough not to frighten whatever wild animal she is sure must be trapped up there. The loneliness of an unlived-in house, with no one to shelter – eventually, out of sheer need to fulfill its purpose, it will lower its defences and let in the wild things: squirrels in the rafters, mice behind the baseboards, birds roosting in the eaves.

Katriina follows the sound until she is at the threshold to Claudia’s room. Standing there, she imagines Margaret Paulsson standing in that exact spot before the door opens. Katriina has become mildly obsessed with thinking about those seconds, and the ones after, about how easily a life can be split in two. Margaret Paulsson reaches for the door handle as a normal woman, a woman with a normal life. Then that door opens, maybe creaking on its hinges, a long, mellow sunbeam stretching out from the window across the floor, a shadow swinging through it like the pendulum of a clock. Katriina imagines the destruction of that normal life as more of an unravelling – pieces of the old Margaret Paulsson slowly crumbling away with every agonizing heartbeat between the moment she sees and the moment she understands. To an outsider it would seem quick, but in reality it would take a terrible, breathless eternity.

Katriina opens the door. It is not the first time she has been in this room, of course – she has led dozens of potential buyers through, pointing out the light in the room, the depth of the closet, all that space. The furniture has been removed, but there it is, the faint girl smell, of baby powder and something earthier, more bodily – blood and sweat. The room is perfectly square, with a street-facing window on the far wall set into an alcove with a built-in bench underneath it. Gauzy curtains dangle limply from a rod. The fan has been taken down, leaving a discoloured circle in the centre of the ceiling. Katriina shivers. It’s as though the window has been left open and the wind has ripped through the room, although the curtains remain resolutely still.

“Hello?” she calls into the void.