She frowns. “A turret is quirky, Adam. A sauna cabin in the garden is quirky. A windowless top-floor room you can barely stand up in is just a waste of space.”
“Aren’t you even a little curious about the bits and pieces up there?”
“This house is full of bits and pieces—they’re everywhere you look. There’s a toilet brush left behind in the little bathroom that would have to be carbon dated to figure out how old it is. And some of the junk in the garage is older than all of us put together. Are you suggesting we keep all of it for curiosity’s sake? All this random stuff?”
“Of course not,” I say. “Some bits are more interesting than others, that’s all.”
Leah gestures at me with a long chip on the end of her wooden fork. “Just because it’s old, Dad, it doesn’t make it interesting.”
“Sometimes it does.”
It was an exchange we’d had many times on holiday, when I’d insist on at least one day trip to the nearest castle as a historical interlude to the beach and the swimming pool. Or as Leah tended to call it, “dragging us all around a pile of boring oldstones.”They were not always the most popular days of the holiday but I hoped that maybe,maybe, a little bit of the history bug might rub off on my children. Although there wasn’t much evidence of that yet.
“Or it just means no one’s got around to getting rid of it.” Leah puts her red-and-white Converse up on a cardboard box, leaning back. “Uh-oh. He’s got that look, Mum.”
“I know,” Jess says, offering one last piece of fish to the cat. “Don’t encourage him.”
I hold my hands out, palms up. “What look?”
“You know.” Leah dips another chip in brown sauce. “That look you always get when you’re taking things apart, or fixing them.”
“Feels like you two are ganging up on me.”
“You quite like it though, don’t you, Dad?”
“What?”
“The annex, the secret room, whatever you call it. You’ve always wanted a man cave, haven’t you?”
“I’m not sure itisa man cave.”
“What is it then?”
“Don’t know yet,” I say, reaching for one last chip. “But I’m going to find out.”
6
Crying.
I jerk awake, heart thudding painfully in my chest, and for a moment I have absolutely no idea what time it is or where I am. A hotel? I pull the duvet off and swing my legs out of bed, cursing silently as I collide with something in the dark, hard wooden furniture that’s not where it should be. Blinking in the blackness, raising my hands to the left and right, my brain still stuck in neutral.
Then I remember: not our old bedroom. Anewbedroom, in our new house.
The crying comes again, a single word getting louder and more urgent with every repetition. “Daddee! Daddee!”
Still disoriented in the dark, I feel my way around the king-sized bed and out onto the landing. It ispitchblack.
Along the landing, I blink for a minute, trying to get my bearings, waiting for my eyes to adjust. This house—in the dark, in the dead of night—is a strange new landscape I’ve never had to navigate before.
The cries come again, dissolving into sobs.
In the little box room, I stub my toe on a cardboard box full of soft toys. By the pale blue glow of the mushroom night light, I can see the small single bed pushed against the far wall. My youngest daughter is sitting up, covers bunched around her waist, her blonde hair a bird’s-nest tangle around her head.
She reaches her arms up to me and clamps on like a limpet, her cheek damp with tears against my shoulder.
She clings to me, crying, shaking, and I know what’s happened even before the sharp smell of urine reaches my nostrils. The sheet is wet beneath her. She’s always been a good sleeper and hasn’t wet the bed for at least a couple of years. But I guess the disruption of a new bedroom in a new house must have triggered something. It might even be the novelty of not sharing with her brother anymore, the sense of being alone in an unfamiliar place.
Now that I’m here, she’s repeating something over and over again in between her sobs. It takes a moment before I can make out her words and I shush her gently.
