‘Well.’ She stops and I don’t know if she’s trying to decide how to put it or whether to tell me at all, but it’s enough to make my hands ball into fists in the pockets of my jacket. ‘People seeing grim reapers isn’t a big deal as they’re unlikely to notice you. So if Alice Anderson walked in here yesterday, while the window was open, she may well have seen you as you look to me now, but she would have no reason to be concerned because you’re just a stranger in a bookshop, right?’

OK.

That makes sense.

‘But if it was your mother, for example.’ She holds up her hands, as if expecting me to recoil in horror. ‘Not that I’m saying that anything is going to happen to your mother. But for example, if your mother walked in here, while the window was open, she may well see you, Ash, her daughter, and that would be it.’ She claps her hands. ‘The whole thing falls apart. She’d want to know why you’re not dead and you’d have to tell her that she’s going to die.’

‘Would that be such a bad thing, though?’ My voice sounds tiny, like it’s coming from across the street.

‘Of course it would,’ she says, as if it’s obvious. ‘There are things we shouldn’t know, Miss Persaud. When we’re going to die is one of them.’

‘Why?’

‘Why?’ She waits for me to meet her gaze, then frowns at me. ‘Because what if they tried to change it? To avoid it? This.’ She turns her hands in circles over the counter, like a magician at a kid’s birthday party before he pulls a rabbit out of a top hat. ‘What we do, only works because we don’t interfere with the process, we merely facilitate it. We know more than most, more than we should, some would say, but we don’t know everything. And rightly so. It’s a delicate balance that is easily disturbed, and when it is, the universe is out of kilter and the knock-on effect could go on for years. Generations, in fact. That’s why we must be careful.’

‘And if we’re not?’

‘You have to be, Ash,’ she says, returning to the pile of books.

I think about what Dev said in Primark then, about the black dress between the two pink ones.

‘Because someone else might die when they were supposed to? Someone who wasn’t going to die.’

I hear my voice quiver as I say it.

If Deborah notices, she doesn’t acknowledge it, just lifts her shoulder and lets it fall again. ‘They might,’ she says, as if it’s nothing. As if we’re talking about the weather and she’s told me that it might snow again tomorrow.