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The bright autumn sunlight was streaming through the kitchen window, glaring off the white tiled walls, making Anna lift a hand to shield her squinting eyes. A week ago, she had been in London, and now here she was halfway around the world in her sister’s house, alone for the first time since she had landed three days ago. No family, no old friends, no chatter, just her and the cold empty kitchen. She shuffled across the green linoleum floor, lowering her hand and blinking against the sting of the light as she went, her eyes watering, dampening her cheeks. She reached the chipped marble worktop and started making herself a cup of tea. The alcohol and late nights, mixed with the jet lag from the long flight, made her head throb with every heartbeat, and she felt weary and sluggish. She had woken in the night with a weight so crushing on her chest she couldn’t move. Now that same weight seemed to have spread to her arms and legs, dark and thick, like tar in her veins, slowing every movement. Even time felt as if it was slowing down, the ticks of her grandmother’s old clock on the wall drifting further and further apart.

It was late on Monday morning and Anna had slept through the chaotic rush of her sister’s family getting ready for work and school. ‘One small mercy,’ she muttered, the words briefly cutting through the silence before it wrapped itself tightly around her again. Or maybe it would have been better to wake with the family, and not be alone all day. She shook her head and shoulders like a cat in the rain. She didn’t have any emotional space for even small regrets, things were unmanageable enough now as it was. Only a week ago, she had answered her phone at work to hear the distressed and halting words of her father, first telling her to find somewhere private, then hoarsely whispering, ‘She… she’s gone.’ It was her sister, Kate, who had taken the phone from him and gently explained that their mother had died suddenly at home an hour earlier, and that Anna needed to come back right away. Too shocked to make plans herself, Anna’s partner had booked her flight, just the one ticket. He wouldn’t be coming with her because of work, because of money, because of reasons she had buried beneath this other, bigger pain.

When she arrived on Friday evening, she’d been told she wouldn’t be staying with her father, John, in the family home, but with Kate instead. The house wouldn’t be comfortable for her, he’d said, there wasn’t a bedroom suitable anymore, plus it would be too distressing so soon after her mother, Rebecca’s, passing in the house just a few days before. Their home had been so beautiful when Anna was little, full of art and flowers, but now every room was full of piles of books, old newspapers, and boxes of belongings all covered in dust; whatever helped to create her mother’s own personal world, whatever helped her feel safe. The illness had begun years ago, but none of the many doctors or specialists could say what it was. It had eaten away at Rebecca, leaving her often barely able to stand on her own. And after claiming her body, the illness crept into her mind like a noxious vine, twining through her thoughts and feeding on her once endless vitality and spirit, tightening until her very sense of self began to wither. Then, a week ago, it must have finally wrapped itself so tightly around her heart that it couldn’t take any more, and it simply stopped beating.

Anna carried her cup to the table by the kitchen window. As she sipped her tea, she watched the white, sparkling frost on the driveway slowly dissolve into soggy grey and brown as the morning sunlight crept across the ground. Small mottled clouds were beginning to gather across the bright blue sky, muting the sunlight now and then, and casting restless, shifting shadows over the hillside in the distance. In the few days it had taken her to fly from London, her father had decided to sell the family home and had already arranged for an estate agent to visit that morning, even though all the piled up papers and boxes were still there in every room. Anna hoped the weather would hold because the house needed all the help it could get. At least if the sun was shining through the windows, it might make the place seem like it had potential, rather than just a roof over a sad old pile of junk. But more clouds were drifting in now from the south, and a mild wind was stirring the leaves on the trees in the garden. Her gaze shifted to her own reflection in the windowpane, and she wished the woman staring back wasn’t really her, because that woman looked awful, with dark bags under her eyes and hollow cheeks. She ran her hands through her greasy hair, watching her reflection do the same. Maybe a shower would help move the heaviness sitting inside her.

The bathroom walls were damp from the family’s morning showers and the room felt even chillier than the kitchen. Shivering in her pyjamas, she grabbed a fresh towel from the pile on the shelf in the corner and placed it on the lid of the toilet seat beside the bath, so she could reach it quickly when she finished her shower. She was dreading taking off her clothes in the cold; it was bad enough with them on. She reached around the wet shower curtain, trying her best not to touch the patches that were stained with black mould, and turned on the shower taps. Kate had warned her that the boiler was old, and the tank small, so if she wanted a bath it was best to have it in the evening, and to keep her morning showers short if she didn’t want to be blasted with glacial cold water. The pipes creaked and groaned, sounding as thrilled to be woken for a shower as she was to be having one. She undressed and looked for a hook for her pyjamas, but finding none, she scrunched them into a ball and tried to throw them onto the shelf with the pile of towels, but they tumbled off and fell into a small puddle of water on the floor. ‘Damn it, that’s my only pair,’ she thought, ‘who doesn’t have hooks in their bathroom?!’ She picked up her soggy pyjamas from the floor and threw them begrudgingly into the laundry basket, hitting her target this time.

The shower water was now steaming in the icy bathroom air. Anna stepped over the side of the bath, still careful not to touch the shower curtain, and huddled under the lukewarm stream of water. She washed her hair as best she could before the water soon began to run cold. She wound the cracked silver taps off and was reaching round the shower curtain to grab her towel, when there was a sudden bang that made her jump. Snatching the towel, she wrapped it around herself and stepped onto the soggy bathmat, just as there was a hard whack, followed by the sound of tree branches scratching across the bathroom window. 'Jesus Christ!’ Her hand flying to her chest.

The bathroom had been lit by sunshine when she came in, so she hadn’t turned on the light. She hadn’t noticed the room growing darker while she was in the shower, but through the window she could now see that the sky had become a dense mass of slate-grey clouds, and the wind had picked up making the garden shed door bang on its hinges and the tree outside scrape against the window. ‘Four bloody seasons in one bloody day here,’ she muttered.

Anna dried herself with the towel, tucked it back around her chest, and made her way to her room to get dressed. She collected her headphones from where she had left them the night before on the bedside table, put on what she liked to call her ‘sanity playlist’, a mix of old funk and soul tracks, and rummaged through her suitcase for her tracksuit pants and hoodie. Her father’s voice was echoing in her head, going on about how you ‘can’t go around with wet hair in the cold without catching a chill.’ So she picked up the hairdryer from the dressing table, its weight like a dumbbell from the gym in her hand, and dropped it back down. Weren’t chills a problem for people in the nineteenth century, anyway?

It had snowed yesterday, the morning after the funeral. Not enough to settle, but still a dramatic change in the weather. Anna couldn’t help thinking how bitterly cold her poor mother must have been, buried down there in the dark under all that earth. She knew it wasn’t rational, but she still had this clawing feeling that her mother shouldn’t be out there alone, in the cold. Leaving the bedroom, she shuffled her way back down the hallway to the kitchen, one heavy footstep after another dragging across the faded violets and roses on the carpet under her feet.

Anna’s mother, Rebecca, had been a brilliant academic, but she had always been drawn to the strange and unusual, to the darker edges of life. She was an intensely private woman and almost territorial about her home, dismissing more than one housekeeper hired by Anna’s father because she couldn’t bear strangers being in her space and, she presumed, snooping around her closely guarded possessions. When Anna and her sister were little, Rebecca had locked all her esoteric books in a glass cabinet in the living room, forbidding them to ever go near it, warning that these were not matters to be played around with by children. But those books had been too tempting, and Anna had stolen the key and looked through them, all those photographs of ghostly apparitions and illustrations of demons, leaving her unable to sleep at night, terrified of what she might see if she opened her eyes in the dark. Anna never told her mother she had looked through the books, not because she feared punishment, but because she couldn’t bear the thought of disappointing her.

Things had been strained between Anna and her mother for years and she hadn’t called her for over a month. Anna had been busy with work, with life, but the honest truth was that she had avoided calling because her mother’s state of mind left her feeling drained and hopeless when they spoke. She had wasted so much time hiding behind pointless resentments and now the guilt of this kept sweeping over her; the shame of her selfishness prickling through her body.

As Anna reached out to push open the kitchen door, it suddenly swung back and slammed against the doorframe in front of her, making her jump. A rush of air blew past her, knocking all the letters off the sideboard at the end of the hallway. ‘Ghost!’ Anna immediately thought, whipping off her headphones and standing completely still, breath fast and shallow, waiting to hear a sound from what might be on the other side. Anna considered herself a reasonable and rational person, but when startled by a slamming door or a creaking floorboard, her first thought was always that it must be supernatural, and definitely bad supernatural.

She took a deep breath, gingerly pushed open the door and peeked around the side into the kitchen. Seeing nothing obviously spectral, she stepped into the room, just as the side of the house was hit by an enormous gust of wind that shook the walls and rattled the windows, making the cups and plates in the cupboards clatter against each other. The wind bashed against the windowpane like a fist against the glass, and the bathroom door, on the far side of the kitchen, rattled like someone had a hold of the handle and was angrily shaking it against the frame. Rain was pounding on the corrugated iron roof with a collective deafening boom. There was a screeching, ripping sound, followed by a massive thud from above her, and then a large tree branch rolled down off the roof and crashed past the window. The kitchen door behind her swung open again and banged against the frame, making her jump a second time. Even the kitchen light was flickering, like she was in some horror film. Outside, the trees thrashed about wildly as the wind swept violently round the side of the house, grabbing at the leaves and whipping off small weak branches and spiralling them up into the air. Water was streaming down the driveway and starting to flood the ground outside the garden shed.

‘Not OK. Not OK. Not OK,’ Anna whispered, barely hearing her own voice over the storm. The house gave a slow, uneasy groan, like the wind was pushing to see what might finally give way. Was it safe being here at all? The place felt as fragile as she did. What if the roof tore away? What if a window blew in? Her fingers trembled as she dug her phone out of her track-pants pocket. She tried Kate first, but it went straight to voicemail. She scrolled to her father’s number, biting a thumbnail while the call rang, the rain still hammering the corrugated iron roof in violent bursts. The walls were shuddering with each blast from the storm, a loose branch scraped across the window like a warning. At last her father answered.

‘Sorry, dear, can I call you back? We’re having a terrible time with this weather. The estate agent is here, looking through the house. Your mother would have hated this, but what choice do I have? I just can’t stay here without her. You understand, don’t you?’

Of course Anna understood. And suddenly, the storm outside felt personal. Raw, furious, vengeful anger, lashing itself against the house.

‘That’s OK, Dad. Call me when you’re free,’ she murmured, and ended the call.

Anna dropped into a chair by the window. Her own reflection stared back at her again from the glass, pale and shaken, tears starting to roll down its cheeks.

‘I love you, Mum. It's OK,’ she whispered, as the storm raged on.