The cat was a large and handsome animal, its fur thick and deep, brindle. Or tortoise shell? When was the last time Shay had seen something made out of tortoise shell? Her grandmother’s set of combs? Her fingers rub the cat’s warm belly. Her grandmother’s house had been her model of fantasy worlds. Rich and dark textures. Every piece of furniture was arcane and specific to a purpose, from the roll-top writing desk with its hundred tiny draws, to the cutlery caddy that opened up a green felt chamber in which all the ivory handled silverware waited in their precisely fitted positions. Even the wood of these wonders wasn’t the wood of the rest of the world. A thousand dark shades, a thousand patterns of grain and knot, arranged as inlays or in a symmetry that seemed magical – like the far edge of a lake, where the land meets its mirror.

Shay was twenty when they moved her grandmother out of her old house and into a care home. Twenty when they sold the treasures. The only thing that went with her grandmother to the place that could never be her home was a little vanity table. Her tortoise shell combs in their silver case in one of the secret drawers. Thirty-three now, Shay wonders what happened to the table and to the combs. The cat purrs, its ear flicks.