She had always said she would never be the kind of parent whose child would not feel comfortable talking to them. She hoped her child would always feel like she was good enough, worthy, no matter what she did, and could feel safe enough to talk, like she was seen and heard, not shooed away like a mouse.

Helen liked to think that she had succeeded in that, but the older Mills got, the less they shared.

The house was laughing at her.

Look at you, turning into your mother.

Those childhood feelings lingered, even at the age of forty-seven. The feeling that no matter how hard she tried, she just didn’t measure up, couldn’t get things right. The house was looking at her disapprovingly now, out here in the dark on her own, juxtaposing a jasmine tea with a few puffs on an illicit cigarette she had smuggled out in her cardigan pocket. The orange end glowed fierce and angry as she pulled on the filter, breathing in the nicotine and relishing the dizziness that followed. She rarely smoked these days. Hugh hated it. Helen hated it. The smell, the taste. But sometimes she needed to feel the childish rebellion that the cigarette represented, taking her back to the days when she would hang out of that top right-hand window, breathing the smoke into the night air and wafting it away with one hand while gripping onto the edge of the window ledge with the other, hoping her disinterested mother wouldn’t smell it through the floorboards and get angry, which would end in a slap or a kick, while hoping that her increasingly distant father might. Maybe then he would come up to her room, look her in the eye for once and shout at her rather than dismissing her or looking straight through her.

The irony was that Helen now recognised that vacant disregard on Hugh’s face sometimes. Maybe it’s true that you end up marrying your father.

She took one last puff on the cigarette, then ground it against the underside of the bench. Her thighs had numbed to the cold, but she didn’t want to go in just yet. She put her empty mug down and looked up at the house again, now almost completely dark apart from the lights blazing on the second floor. The stained glass window was a dark yawn and Lydia’s room had the curtains drawn, the light behind it rose-tinted from her fairy lights, but next to it was Matt’s room, the light piercing against inky black edges.