Jem’s breath puffed out in white bursts as she stopped on the doorstep to watch the moon gliding from behind a thin layer of cloud. There wasn’t much light pollution in Stanny Brook, and she could see countless pinpricks of stars in the clear patches of sky. Perhaps her next read would be a book on astronomy, so she might be able to name what she was looking at.

“Ye gods and little fishes. Put wood in t’hole!” Rosie bellowed from the depths of the cottage. Not quite as enamoured of the night sky, she had already levered her boots off and disappeared into the kitchen to whack the thermostat up.

A week after the last flood warning had been lifted, Greater Manchester was a solid block of ice, with plummeting temperatures freezing the waterlogged fields and parks and gardens. It made walking anywhere tricky, but Jem had befriended a neighbouring Jack Russell, and Rosie was full of beans following the removal of her stitches, so a picnic at the monument on the Pike had been the order of the day.

Jem bolted the door and stacked her boots next to Rosie’s. Rubbing her chilled hands together, she wandered into the living room, where Fluffy blinked at her from his climate-controlled vivarium, showing no inclination to leave his branch and be sociable.

“I don’t blame you,” she said, crouching to arrange kindling and paper on the log burner. The match flickered in the chimney’s draught, the paper catching quickly and the kindling as usual being a complete bugger.

“Kettle’s on,” Rosie said. She knelt beside Jem and pinched a match from the box, lighting a piece of paper at random. “I wish I could tell you I had a knack for this, but mainly I just cross my fingers and hope for the best.”

The embers flared en masse and then snuffed out just as rapidly. Jem sighed and pulled more kindling from the stack. “Back to the drawing board.”

Rosie scrambled up again as the kettle whistled. “Back to the kitchen for me. Good luck with all that,” she said, and cackled when Jem lobbed a ball of newspaper at her.

Jem smiled as she listened to her pottering about the kitchen, opening drawers, sliding the kettle off the burner, and playing a tune on the mugs with a teaspoon. She pictured where Rosie was as she moved: hopping with impatience by the hob as the tea steeped, or leaning on the counter that overlooked the garden. Jem had spent so long at the cottage since their discharge from the hospital that its layout was as familiar to her as the house she rented, and it was starting to feel like home in a way that the rental never had, although she suspected Rosie was a very large part of that.

The kindling finally succumbed, and she shut the burner’s door as Rosie returned with steaming mugs.