Stop it. Now. Get up and check, the way you make your son do. No burglars in the wardrobe, no monsters under the bed.

You sit up.

The French teacher who told you when walking at night to hold your house keys in your fist and poke a key through your first and second fingers, a makeshift weapon. A novel where someone thwarts attempted abduction by piercing her captor’s eye with a hairpin. You cast around the room. An architect’s pencil, the sort that pushes up refillable lead through a bright, sharp point? A paperclip? 81

A siren streams past on the road outside, shrill and discordant.

You quell the bubble of a sob.

Your phone is in the corridor. You read an article about the correlation between cell phone radiation and cancer, which led you down an internet rabbit hole to official public health guidance by the State of California on how to reduce exposure to radio-frequency energy. Ever since, you’ve insisted that phones aren’t charged in the bedroom overnight; the plug socket in your cramped bedroom is right by the baby’s cot. And what would you do, anyway, missed-call your husband until he woke, then text that there might be someone in the flat? Message your family group, your sister thousands of miles away in another time zone, and ask her to phone the police?

What, the operator would say, is the nature of your emergency?

I woke, in the night.

You ease the duvet off your legs and get out of bed. Once you have babies, they say, you’ll never really sleep again, even after the babies finally do. Your feet on the floor like the herd of elephants you’re always chastising your son about. If there’s anyone in the flat, they’ll have heard you now. Abandoning your plans to sidle along the wall, you go quickly into the corridor, grab your phone. You stand for a moment. Nothing. Into your son’s room. He’s sideways in bed, half hanging out. You lift him, tuck him back in, press 82your lips to his neck. He moans. The baby, as predicted, has started to cry. Back into your bedroom, and pick her up. She stops crying, starts to rootle, but you don’t feed her yet, just put her down in the cot where she can’t fall out. To the sound of her outrage, you go down the corridor the other way, past the front door and into the living room.

Nothing and everything looks amiss.

It was the Venetian blinds hanging over the open door, clicking against the doorframe in the breeze. It was a block, and then another, toppling from your son’s precarious tower, constructed with Duplo and cereal boxes and his baby sister’s bricks, which he insisted you leave out overnight.

You slide the balcony door closed, twist the handle up.