She was not a good mother. But she was a mother, and he is still a child, and without her, he does not quite know himself.

Alisha listens, even when he is silent. She loves him. She loves to be needed, too. Close as they have been, he never needed her before, not like Oni did. She cannot say this – to him, or to herself – but there is something wonderful about his grief, the way it sits between them, and they share it.

Paula spends the summer running. She bought some leggings, and yellow trainers, and a sweatband. After six weeks she can feel herself getting stronger. She tries not to run where other people do, although they’re hard to avoid. She knows she is not like the young, muscular women she sees running full pelt by the river. She’s forty-seven now, and although she is slim, when she sees herself in the mirror she can’t help noticing that the line of her legs has a waver to it above the knee. When she runs she feels strong, but she knows her feet hit the ground in a more laboured and tentative way than they might.

She goes high. She finds herself better than she expected at running up hills, and on uneven ground. It seems to make up for her other weaknesses. She runs from the back of her house up quiet streets to where the moors start, and then along a grit road that accesses some farm buildings buried in a fold of the fell. When she gets to the buildings, she runs at an angle down a public footpath, by a fence, the heather whipping her legs on either side. The path leads back round to the road, and she retraces her steps down the streets to her house.

She often goes with the hope that she will work out a problem. She’ll set it in her head. But quickly, she finds the effort she is expending crowds thought out of her mind, and she’s full of feet striking ground, air in lungs and the cool of wind on her sweaty neck. Eventually she notices what she’s really thinking. Instead of a reasoned attempt to figure out how to square the budget, she is speaking to herself in breathless, inane sentences that might have been culled from the interior monologue of a ten-year-old.

Yeah, you’re strong.

Come on, you can do it.

In those moments, she finds an image of herself as a fearless, rock-leaping athlete. When her feet strike the ground, she lucid-dreams herself as running for days, never tiring, fleeing and searching at the same time. Obstacles become literal. On bad days, she is fighting as she runs, whirling with a two-handed sword of the kind she used to dream about as a twelve-year-old playing Dungeons & Dragons in the eighties.