My parents told me to empty my farmhouse for their forty anniversary guests. I said my daughter was eleven days out of a bone-marrow transplant. Mum said: “Lock her upstairs.” I agreed — and on Saturday the sheriff was waiting at my gate.

website with a booking form and a price list. Weekends from two thousand four hundred dollars. Exclusive use of the house, the barn and the grounds. Parking for sixty.

And on the front page of that website is a photograph of my kitchen.

The one I tiled myself over two weekends in the spring of 2021, with a borrowed cutter and a YouTube video, with a line of tiles by the window that is about three millimetres out and that I notice every single day.

Twenty-two bookings over three years. Deposits and balances paid into an account I have never seen, opened at a bank in the next county.

How did I not know?

Because I work. Because the house is a mile off the road behind a hill. Because every single booking was on a weekend when I was away, and because my mother has known my calendar for