The silence that follows suggests they’re both equally stunned. Calling Alba was definitely a mistake. But Klara hadn’t picked up and she’d needed to talk to someone. Anyone, she’d thought at the time. Now, she just wants to hang up.

‘But seriously, you should come out tonight.’ Alba says after a while. ‘I’m going and I’d love to see you.’

‘Nah, I’m halfway home already.’

‘Are you sure? We can get smashed and you can stay over at mine.’

‘Another time. Look, I have to go, it’s bloody torrential out here and I can’t see for shit.’

She ends the call.

‘Fucking bimbo,’ she mutters and tosses the phone onto the passenger seat.

You or her?

Just as she lets go of the phone, it starts ringing again. Without taking her eyes off the road, she reaches out and fumbles around to reach it. Maybe Klara?

A quick glance at the screen crushes the faint hope of talking to a normal person.

Dad.

Not now.

Definitely not now, she thinks and rejects the call.

Chapter 74

74

She doesn’t know what woke her up. Maybe a realisation that trickled through the layers of sleep: she can’t keep sleeping; she has to get up sometime. Yes, maybe that realisation.

Or a noise.

She lies still, like a seal pup on a warm rock, in her duvet cocoon, holding her breath and straining her ears.

Nothing.

I’m probably just ready to wake up, she muses and clumsily turns over to check the clock radio. Stiffens when she sees the green digits shining in the dark. 8.33 p.m.

Oh my God, I’ve slept for . . . she counts on her fingers . . . almost nine hours. How is that even possible? And how can I still feel tired? Still feel like if I just allowed my eyes to close, I’d go straight back to sleep?

Reluctantly, she sticks a foot out of bed and feels the cold swirl around her ankle. Just the other day the weather had been unseasonably warm and she had turned off the furnace. Now, it can’t be more than a few degrees above freezing. And it’s raining, she realises, suddenly aware of the patter against the window. That must be what woke her up.

She needs to pee again. And she’s hungry, she realises. Not the lurching feeling of nausea, but a ravenous hunger for proper food. And lots of it, she thinks, trying to remember what they have in the fridge.

And coffee.

She wants coffee again. When did that happen?

She resolutely throws the duvet aside, steels herself against the cold, and snatches up her old dressing gown from where it lies tossed over an armchair. The plush terrycloth fabric with its blue and green stripes. Dad’s. The one he got for his fiftieth birthday and refused to wear at first.