It begins like any other day. Frances Buchanan wakes with the dawn. The sun rises over the crook of the Campsies and shines in through her bedroom window. The curtains are not drawn to shield her. There are, in fact, no curtains to draw. One of her first acts of independence on the day she moved into the spare room with its single bed and east-facing windows, was to stand on a chair and take down the curtains, fold them neatly and drop them in the bottom of her wardrobe. That was two years ago. She intended, at the time, to re-hang them for the winter but the double glazing was new and efficient and by the end of summer she had grown used to the broad reach of the sky. So she has left the curtains gathering dust and now, on a bright morning in May, the first rays of the sun ease over the edge of the hills and fall across the hollows of her eyes and tease her awake.

She lies still for a while letting go of the noise of her dreams and listens instead to the familiar quiet of the world at sleep. A grandfather clock ticks heavily downstairs in the lounge; a wedding present from her in-laws, that she might never forget their existence. On the other side of the wall, their son, who is still her husband, wakes with a grunt and rolls over to check his alarm clock before turning once again to sleep. Up in the loft, one of the cats drops heavily in through the open sky-light. A soft scurry of smaller feet suggests the gift it carries may not yet be ready to meet its maker. Frances opens her eyes and watches the patterns of light shift and change on the ceiling. In time, she hears the sounds of her son’s awakening; a cautious, whispered conversation with the cats, a token splash of water that passes for a wash and then the scuff of bare feet on the uncovered wood of the loft, down the ladder and across the hallway to pause outside her bedroom door.

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