The dream was always the same. She is standing in a darkened room, silent save for the gentle rhythm of flapping wings. In front of her there are thousands of tiny blue hummingbirds: small, fragile, beautiful. She studies them, unsure whether she is unable to move or simply unwilling to disturb them. They flutter in the tentative light of early morning, their tiny bodies a miracle of nature, the speed of their wings too fast for the eye to follow. There is something meditative in watching them, their miniature movements hypnotic. But suddenly they are swarming toward her, beating their wings against her cheeks, her hair, her neck. She raises her hands to protect her face, but the birds are so small they inch around the gaps, their long beaks pecking at her flesh. She closes her eyes, tries to bat them away, but there are too many, all flapping and pecking, and she feels the first sting of a beak piercing her skin, followed by another, and then another: the bridge of her nose, her forehead, her scalp. And then they are pecking at her eyes and she is flailing her arms, trying to escape their assault, but there are too many and there is nothing she can do to stop them. She feels the blood trickle down her cheeks, tastes its metallic flavor on her tongue, hears their wings beating in her ears. And then she wakes up.

Lily gulped at the water, willing the images to release her now she was awake. She’d been having this dream for years yet still she woke every time panicked, sweating, scrabbling for air.

She lay down again and stared up at the shadow of the chandelier on the ceiling. It had been Daniel’s anniversary present to her last year: bespoke hand-blown Italian glass, a thousand separate clear pendants hanging from a central stem like an exotic crystal tree, the kind of chandelier you might find in the lobby of a boutique hotel or a Michelin-starred restaurant. Lily had seen the receipt lying on the desk in Daniel’s study, had balked at the cost, but Daniel had needed to give her something extravagant to assuage his guilt at being abroad on their anniversary for the third year in a row.

Lily stared up at the chandelier, imagining that perhaps the two men who’d come to install it hadn’t done the job properly, that it might come crashing down on her head one night as she lay sleeping.

Reaching over and switching off her bedside lamp, she curled her limbs into a fetal ball, held herself tight, and implored herself to go to sleep.

Chapter 15

Jess

Just over two miles west of where Lily lay awake, Jess raised her head from the pillow and looked at the clock.

3:22 a.m.

From the room next door she could hear the rustle of a duvet. There had been so many nights since her mum moved in that Jess had been aware of her restlessness in the early hours of the morning. So many nights she had sensed them both lying awake in adjacent rooms, barely fifteen feet apart, separated only by a line of bricks, two thin layers of plaster, and three decades of unspoken conversations. On many occasions she had listened to her mum tossing and turning, knowing she should get out of bed, put her head around the door, and offer to make her some cocoa. But she hadn’t, not once. And Jess didn’t know whether what stopped her was the fear of discovering the reason for her mum’s insomnia or the anxiety that she might disclose her own.