The Scientific Method
Mara is loud, interfering and occasionally annoying, but let it never be said that she doesn’t know how to treat her friends.
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
