My head is filled with the little girl who visited the hospital yesterday. Each time I try to explain away her appearance there, I fail. I look over my shoulder, half-expecting to see Zac.

I am on my morning run. The route is already in my bones. My body moves along it without effort, though I barely slept last night. Hearing Peggy and James’s voices comforted me, but agitated me too. For so long, I have had to hide myself from the few people in the world I love, all the time fearing that Zac would turn up. Now, there is a high probability that he has, as well as the distinct possibility that he dragged a wife and child along with him.

But I am not going to sit around waiting for them to pop out at me again. Or for him to. I added Eliza to my telephone contacts last night. ‘Madam likes to be up early,’ she had said, ‘and my husband’s usually out before the sun, so call any time.’ I grab my phone from the pocket in the waistband of my leggings and use a voice command to do just that.

As we speak, Eliza clatters breakfast things and tries not to sound stressed, while Alice chatters in the background. We arrange to meet in the park for a quick coffee tomorrow morning, before I go into work. ‘Getting Alice out early into fresh air would be good,’ she says. There is a screech from Alice, and a crash of what sounds like glass onto tiles. ‘As you can hear.’ Eliza breaks off, though she hurriedly promises to bring the coffees.

I put the phone away and speed up. The sun is cutting through the pre-dawn mist and the bluebells are out already. Despite the two miles I have already run, and the call, I am not at all out of breath. I had to work hard to get this strong after it happened.

I turn into the disused railway line, going faster still, then enter the first tunnel. The dimness swallows me. The air seems still and dead, and smells of damp. Soon, though, the motion sensors begin, the flashes and sounds activated by my movement – Milly would love this. A circle of blue light surrounded by a white halo blazes at me from a window-shaped cut-out in the wall of stone, then a blast of violin music that is louder than my breathing as I speed up. But the tunnel is filled with ghosts, as if Eliza and Alice brought them along to the hospital and released them to chase after me.

I emerge into fresh, cool air, and the song of birds. There is the magic glimpse of a kingfisher in the gap between the two tunnels, by the river below. After the one that froze here last Christmas, I want so badly to take it as a good sign, but can’t bring myself to.