Then things continued. A discarded burger wrapper was the first to move. The wind blew, the children jumped, the birds flew, and everyone apart from me started to talk. A man started crying. I watched people trying to make phone calls. The rumours had been around for months and it shouldn’t have been a surprise – and yet it was.

I walked to the nearest bench and sat down. There was a woman already there, who was old enough to have been my grandmother and I wished she was (my grandmother had died last year), and we looked at each other, then quickly away.

‘Well,’ she said. ‘How about that?’

I couldn’t answer.

‘OK for me really. I’ve lived my life and I’ll take all my pills before this happens. This isn’t the way I’m going to go, thank you very much. It’s you young people … I mean, look at them, the kiddies. And you. A pretty girl like you. So much ahead.’

I wished she would stop talking. I followed her gaze to the children in the play park, and thought of Sofie and Hans-Erik. I pulled my hair round my hand and nodded. I wrote a text to my mum that just had a couple of words in it (Oh, Mum) but it didn’t go through. I wanted to see Zoe, and I wondered what the scene was like at the Christmas party. I pictured it: happy, noisy, and then frozen, as everyone realized that there wouldn’t be a next Christmas. I sat still for a while and just stared at the park. The grass was scrappy at this time of year, and I wondered whether the worms were going to be all right.

I didn’t realize I was running, but when I looked down I saw that my feet were slapping over cold grass, and I was heading for the street. I bolted down the pavement, ignoring everyone, swerving on to the road when I needed to. We lived two blocks from the park, and as soon as I was running downhill towards home, the door swung open and there was my mother, on the threshold, waiting. I ran straight into her, and she grabbed me and held me, and even though I was taller and chunkier than she was, I wanted to be her baby again.

When I stopped trembling we sat on the sofa. Mum made us both sweet tea, handing me the mug with a hand that wasn’t quite steady. She had somehow gathered together all the chocolate in the house and laid it out on the coffee table.

‘Right,’ she said, when she’d settled down beside me. She handed me a Twix. I opened it. ‘OK. So it seems I was wrong.’