The bell dinged at the counter. Petra showed the shelf of hand-shaped wabi sabi tableware to the dour woman in a slumping grey everyday coat before walking behind the counter and bringing up the daily banking sheet. Suki was perched on a display table like an emo-themed centrepiece, reading a comic – My Solo Exchange Diary, by the looks of it. Apart from the wabi sabi woman, there were no customers downstairs but the CCTV showed four upstairs – a man and a woman together, a woman alone, and a single man. Petra didn’t remember the singletons coming in. The customer heat map she kept in her head was generally pretty accurate – not a particularly taxing skill at Needful Things.

The spreadsheet was more boring and less absorbing than the window cleaning, and the mental chatter she’d successfully shunted away for a couple of hours began to up its volume. The trapped thoughts started circulating again: what had happened last night at Vincent’s house and at the dell, what Ellis Brown had told her, the weird hallucination she’d experienced at Helena’s flat. Well, she had to call it a hallucination, because it would be even more disturbing if it was real. It was clear that Helena hadn’t seen what she’d seen, and when she’d stumbled back and rounded the couch in a defensive lunge towards her mother and got a front-on view of Ida, of course she looked fine – the late-middle-aged woman she’d been introduced to, teeth intact, no bruises or blood. Not the young, battered woman she’d morphed into.

But she hadn’t imagined it. What she’d seen was as real as this pen in her hand, the glass and plastic of the computer, the boxes on the countertop – she tapped them all ritually as she thought, concentrating on the feel of their solidity against her fingers, pressing her palm into the sharp edge of the Pokémon card display case. Yes, a line pressed into her palm, pain triggered. What was real if not that? If she’d reached out the same way and touched Ida’s face, she would have come away with blood on her fingers, she was certain, evidence to prove what she’d seen.

But she didn’t. She had no proof. Her mind was playing tricks on her, and that was far more unsettling than if the world had started to break its rules around her.

She could try to explain herself to Suki – Suki of all people understood mind games and she’d help her rationalise what she was feeling, explain it as the result of some sort of logical trickery, nothing supernatural or psychotic. But she’d keep it to herself for the moment. She minimised the cash control sheet on the computer, opened her browser, and searched for ‘Curtis Worthing’, perching her boots on the narrow rail under Suki’s absurd chair.

A squelch. There was definitely an audible squelch there. Her feet were sodden. Jesus, she was probably having a rare somatic foot-sweat stress reaction. She was almost tempted to run a web search on ‘somatic foot-sweat stress reaction’, but kept focus.