Chapter 2: Everything Gran Left Behind

The airing cupboard smelled of her grandmother the way nowhere else in the flat did anymore.

Mara stood in the hallway with the cupboard door open and breathed it in before she could stop herself — warm cotton, lavender, the particular damp-wood smell of the tank itself, and underneath it all something sweet and faintly smoky that she had always associated with the old woman and never been able to name. Pipe tobacco, maybe, though Gran had never smoked. Something older than that. She had been avoiding this cupboard since the funeral. She had been avoiding most things since the funeral, in the way that you avoid a room where the light has been left on — not from grief exactly but from the peculiar exhaustion of deciding whether to go in and turn it off.

She went in.