While Emily explored, she took a couple of snaps on her phone, but it seemed that when photographed, the estate looked ordinary. The firsthand experience was anything but. The light, the sense of space … Emily felt like she was on an island floating in the sky.

The final clue of the hunt took her back to the guesthouse, where Nina had made a spectacular lunch. A spread of local cheeses, homemade chutneys, and soft, warm bread sat on a table big enough for twelve. A freshly poured glass of sunset-colored wine waited for Emily next to a vase of delicate white and purple flowers.

After lunch, Emily started work. Her first week, Nina explained, would be spent focusing on the guesthouse (to Emily’s enormous relief, there’d been no further mention of looking after Aurelia). Yves, still as terse as the day before, showed up with a huge delivery of paint—twenty-two tins—and together they carried it up the stairs, stacking the tins on the first-floor landing. There seemed to be countless rooms that needed sprucing up, mostly full of furniture covered with dust sheets, plus an open area that, according to Nina, might serve as a second living space. Before they could start sanding and painting, though, they needed to clear everything out and clean up.

When she’d first arrived, Emily had been so dazzled by the beauty of the place that she hadn’t realized just what bad shape the property was in. A closer inspection revealed warped shutters, cracked tiles, and rotting wood. Leaf mulch blocked the drains and gutters; weeds overran the vegetables; pavement was dark with moss; and the guesthouse, while beautiful and well-decorated, was damp and dirty. Most of the walls bulged with moisture, and she developed a habit of running her fingers over the chalky ripples every time she passed. Fortunately, the causes of the damp had been identified and the problems fixed, so it was now just a matter of repairing the damage, the worst of which could be found in the north-facing bedrooms.

Emily found herself wondering again why Nina didn’t just hire a team of professionals to get the whole thing knocked over, but as she worked she began to understand Nina’s enthusiasm for doing things her own way. It was surprising how much she enjoyed chucking on a pair of overalls and getting her hands dirty; there was something extremely satisfying about stripping the rooms right back to their purest state.

It wasn’t all fun, though. She learned fast that rubber gloves were a constant necessity. Moldy sandwiches, mildewed linen, rat droppings, and abandoned cups lined with stinking green fur: they all showed up in the first week, almost as if they’d been deliberately planted to catch her unawares. The place was riddled with filth—which, she supposed, explained the strange lingering smell. In fact, on the third day, Emily tracked a particularly foul stench to an antique wardrobe, inside of which she found a dead animal—possibly a large rodent or a small cat; she didn’t hang around long enough to find out. She fled squealing from the room and slammed the door, only reentering once Yves had been in there with heavy-duty rubbish bags and a dust mask.

Most of the time, though, she found the work relaxing. It was nice to be busy. She put music on and turned the volume up, sweeping and wiping and washing in time to Lady Gaga and Beyoncé. It was, as Juliet would have said, good for the soul. And she wasn’t expected to do everything all by herself: Yves was a constant but silent presence, always hovering somewhere close, working away on something or other. Oddly, he seemed determined to avoid actually speaking to anyone. No matter what was happening around him he remained curiously silent but observant, his eyes sliding sideways like someone watching an argument unfold in a public place. Several times a day, Emily would look up from a task to find him studying her, but he never smiled or said hello. Once or twice she even caught him with his mouth open, as if he might be about to say something, but she could never read his expression and he always turned away at the last minute.

At first, assuming that they were on the same team, she tried to make an effort. She offered him coffee, a sandwich, or a glass of water, but Yves never responded with much more than a grunt, so she stopped trying. Nina seemed to have reached the same conclusion long ago; she never invited him to eat with them, never asked him to stay for a glass of wine, never asked after his wife or kids, and it became increasingly clear that he and Emily were, in fact, on very different teams. While Emily was treated like immediate family, Yves was like the weird second cousin that nobody liked. He came and went as he pleased, rarely spoke, never ate, got the bigger, noisier, dirtier jobs done; and after a while she forgot he was even there.

Meanwhile, Emily felt that she and Nina were developing something of a friendship. Nina often joined her in the guesthouse, donning her own pair of gloves and pretending to retch as they peeled back rotting carpets and delved into the fetid cavities of long-forgotten cupboards. They chatted as they worked, sharing their stories in shy fragments, and gradually they both started to relax. The sun shone and the water glittered and they played loud music through the speakers around the pool. Emily told some anecdotes that made Nina laugh, Nina cracked a few bad jokes, and soon it was as though they’d known each other for years.

Aurelia was never far away, either. When she wasn’t resting or napping inside, she sat somewhere nearby with a coloring book or a box of LEGO. Or she might drift past an open door with a feigned air of disinterest, stopping to check what Emily or Nina or Yves might be doing before disappearing again. Sometimes she seemed to be absent for long periods of time, but Emily soon realized that both houses were riddled with secret hidey-holes and crawl spaces. At first she had worried that the scuffling sound in the walls might be rats, but then she’d remembered how Aurelia had wriggled out from behind the panel in the dining-room wall. After that, Emily found lots of other concealed cupboards, all containing evidence of recent occupation: a collection of dolls, maybe, or a teddy bear’s picnic.

For all their company, though, Emily often felt alone. Not lonely as such, but the estate was so huge that sometimes it felt like she might be the only person on it. Every so often, the quiet would be so pure that she could easily imagine that there was no one else for hundreds of miles; that Nina, Aurelia, and Yves had been wiped out along with the rest of civilization, and Emily was the last human being left on the planet. And despite their burgeoning friendship, Nina was keeping certain boundaries firmly in place.

On her fifth day, for example, Emily couldn’t find anyone for what felt like hours. She needed help dismantling and moving a bed frame, but Yves, for once, didn’t seem to be hanging around, so she went outside to look for him. After an unsuccessful search of the grounds, she gave up and went to the family house.

She circled it twice before plucking up the courage to knock on the front door. Reluctant to go inside (the phrase “no-go zone” kept sounding in her head like a warning siren), she returned to the back patio and called out. But there was no answer.

Suddenly overcome by an eerie feeling that she really was all by herself (maybe her new employer had abandoned her, perhaps as part of some bizarre practical joke or initiation ritual), she opened the patio doors and stepped into the kitchen, calling out again. Everything was quiet, without even a rustle or a murmur to indicate that anyone was home.

Gazing around the room, she took in the antique cabinetry and tableware, the stone tiles and huge farmhouse-style sink, thinking how much it looked like a picture in a magazine: totally perfect and untouched. There it was again, though: that weird smell, barely detectable underneath the waft of scented candles, but definitely there. It was slightly stronger in here, too; earthy and meaty, like rotten wood but with an inexplicable sourness. Emily covered her nose.

Suddenly there was a hand on her shoulder and a voice at her back, and Emily jumped about a foot in the air.

“Everything okay?” Nina asked, slipping her arm around Emily’s shoulders. Emily laughed and nodded, pressing her hand to her heart in a show of relief, so eager to explain herself that she almost missed the strange look on Nina’s face, and the slightly too-tight grip of Nina’s hand. In fact, it was only later that night, after they’d all gone to bed, that Emily registered just how quickly she’d been ejected from the kitchen. Nina had not wanted her there; she’d practically frog-marched Emily back out the door, steering her away from the house with the efficiency of a nightclub bouncer.

Memo received, Emily thought as she drifted off to sleep. “No-go zone” means “no-go zone.”

The baby is placed on my chest and we are covered with warm blankets.