Maria took against her left boot and tried to lever it off, tiny eyebrows becoming curls of indignation. ‘No boot!’ she hollered, kicking violently.

Nico screwed round from the driver’s seat and tickled her tummy through her snowsuit. ‘Yes boot! Or the snow monster will gobble up your toes.’

As suddenly as the tantrum arrived, it vanished. Maria wrinkled her bobble nose to show him her white baby teeth and laughed.

He’d been born with parenting superpowers, Hannah decided as Nico waved through the windscreen at his family and started the ignition. It was the only explanation.

The road out of Älgäng to Lars’s house threaded through the pines. Posts with reflective discs denoted the road’s edges where snow had been ploughed into berms. As they drove into a town bedecked with tasteful white Christmas lights they passed a lake and Nico told them his childhood family home had been on the other shore. The lake was icy at the edges. ‘We used to skate on it,’ Nico reminisced.

Then he swung the car uphill into an area of older homes and into a small drive. ‘Here’s Farfar’s house. Nice of him to let us stay here while he’s in hospital.’

The house was slate grey and white with a rounded turret under a hat-like roof and, the way the snow had clad one side, looked slightly askew, drunk and beautiful like a bride on her hen night. A lady emerged from the next house, bundled in woollens and enormous boots, to talk earnest Swedish over the hedge to Nico. Hannah, letting Josie out and then scooping Maria from her car seat, caught most of what was being said. The neighbour had found Lars lying in the snow when she’d come out to her car. He couldn’t have been there long or he would surely not have survived. Nico clasped the woman’s hand and thanked her.

The neighbour beamed at Hannah, Josie and Maria. ‘Such a lovely family!’

Nico didn’t try and explain who was who but thanked her again before she scurried back to the warmth of her house. He jumped up on the white-painted porch, fishing a key from his pocket and letting them in. They left their boots in the alcove inside the door rather than track snow onto Lars’s parquet floors while Nico went back for the luggage.

Hannah looked around. There were two big rooms downstairs: a sitting room and an L-shaped kitchen-diner that led to a snowy back verandah and a garden with a birdhouse. Nico reappeared, stacking up their bags, wind-blown and out of breath.