Chapter 36

More or less the moment Ryan says he needs to speak with her in person, Mara sets things into motion, arranging with her parents to have him stay for a weekend near Christmas, and sending him endless information on how to get to her remote, armpit-of-North-Wales house.

Some three weeks after she sends him the photos (which are the most-accessed files on Ryan’s laptop, to his shame) he arrives, through seemingly endless clouds of mist and light rain, to a farmhouse on a hillside—screw it, mountainside—in North Wales, with no lights of civilisation anywhere on the lonely, darkening horizon.

It is a warm outpost in a strange desert.

She gets the idea, pretty fast, that this is not a social visit by any means, and shoos away her younger sisters (all four of them) before barricading the two of them in an attic room that seems to be a cross between a private study and a cosy den.