The urge to head out to the beach, to walk through the wet sand and scream into the night had passed. She stood up gently, careful not to shift her weight too much in case it woke him. Grabbing his wine glass, she drained it, returned the glass to the coffee table and headed upstairs to bed.

*

Mills heard her mother walk past her closed door and on up to her own bedroom on the third floor of the house. Hugh would still be asleep on the couch downstairs. She often saw him there when she was getting a glass of water on her way to bed.

They had a strange marriage, but Hugh was harmless. Mills didn’t mind him as far as father figures went. And it wasn’t like she had many other options. She had no idea who her own father was.

She walked over to her bedroom window and opened it wide, then perched on the ledge and leaned back against the window frame. Her bedroom light was off and she felt like she was hovering above the ground, everything dark and still around her. The air was fresh but not too cold, tangy with sea spray. She could see the flat expanse of water in the distance, the moon reflecting off the water. She loved it here. The sounds and smells that only came with being next to the water. The people that she had known all her life, saying hello as she walked past. The sense of belonging.

Even this house. She knew a lot of people would find it ugly, misshapen, grotesque even, with its angles and additions like growths, but she liked the eccentricity of it, the way it didn’t conform with its surroundings.

She knew it wasn’t cool to admit that you liked it at home, but she didn’t want to be anywhere else.

She lit a cigarette and inhaled, the nicotine hit making her momentarily giddy. She was working on practising perfect smoke rings. They weren’t quite perfect yet.

She sat, smoking quietly until the cigarette had burned away, then stubbed it out on the underneath of the window ledge. Movement deep in the darkened garden caught her eye. A fox maybe. She narrowed her eyes. Not a fox – too big.

She recoiled. It was a person.

Dressed in dark clothes, camouflaged against the night, only their steady progress up the garden discernible as they kept to the shadows.

They stopped halfway and stood, staring up at the house.

Then Mills felt more than saw the eyes come to rest on her.

She stared back, more curious than afraid.

This wasn’t the first time this person had come into their garden. Mills knew there was a gate tucked into the stone wall that separated the house from the public coastal path. It was supposed to be kept locked. Her mother was insistent about that.