Ada had lived in the old flat for all seven years of her life, and then, in one single Saturday, she did not live there any more.
The new house smelled of paint. Everything was in boxes with words written on the side in thick pen. KITCHEN. BOOKS. ADA. The stairs made a creak halfway up that the old stairs had never made.
At bedtime her bed was the right bed but it was in the wrong place. The door was where the wardrobe should be. The window was on completely the other side.
"Everything is on the wrong side," said Ada.
"It is," said her dad. "Mine too. I nearly walked into a wall."
He sat on the end of the bed for a bit. Then he said, "Have a look out of it. I had a look earlier."
So Ada knelt up on her pillow and looked out of the new window.
There was a street lamp, and under it a slice of orange light lying on the pavement.
There was a hedge with a gap in it, and sitting in the gap there was a cat, doing nothing at all, in the way that cats can do nothing for hours.
There was a house across the road with a blue door, and a light on upstairs, and on the ceiling of that upstairs room she could see the shadow of a mobile turning slowly round.
"Somebody small lives over there," said Ada.
"Probably," said her dad.
She watched the cat until it stood up, stretched itself into a very long shape, and walked off along the top of the wall as if it had somewhere important to be.
Ada lay back down.
"I know four things now," she said. "The lamp. The gap. The cat. The blue door."
"That's four more than you knew this morning," said her dad. He kissed her head and went out, leaving the door open the width of a hand, the way it had always been open at home.
When he had gone, Ada listened. The new house ticked and shifted as it cooled down. A lorry went past somewhere a long way off. It was quiet in a different key from the old flat, and she missed the old key, and that was all right.
She thought: tomorrow I will find out where that cat goes.
She was asleep before she got to the end of the thought.