Lauren struggled to unbuckle both car seats and lugged them back up the street to the house, listing in her head the reasons she need not be afraid. I need not be afraid because: there’s nothing to be scared of; I’m jumping at shadows; it’s always worse when I haven’t slept well; everything is fine; I’m just nervous because it’s the first time I’ve been out; I’m fretting about the driving, but I need to get it done, get back on the road, or I’ll be stuck forever, a prisoner in my own house.

Keys mined from the handbag where she had sunk them, she went into the house and put the babies, both sleeping, on the couch in their car seats. In the kitchen there wasn’t much to be had in the way of sustenance: an elderly banana, alone in the fruit bowl. An almost empty pack of rye crackers from the cupboard. When she found herself deliberating over a can of tuna, she shook her head, Ridiculous. Anyway, it didn’t matter: she was going to a cafe, so she could get something there.

As she struggled back towards the car with a heavy car seat hooked over each arm she hesitated, then stopped opposite the place she’d thought the woman had stood. Another flicker of black made her jump. But no, nothing, it was that blackbird.

*   *   *

Down in the valley she parked the car by the old millpond and clipped the brightly coloured car seats into the stroller frame. She positioned Morgan above, facing her and Riley below, facing forward. She briefly worried that Riley might feel snubbed somehow but he was asleep, after all, and she could swap them round on the way back so that it was fair. Changing bag, handbag, phone, wallet, keys. She laced up her boots and set off along the river, feeling immediately better. She thought of it as her river, she’d walked the path so many times. In the old life she would regularly go all the way to the New Riverby reservoir, five miles out—she’d even driven over there and hiked the circumference of the lake on the morning of the day she went into labour. Hugely pregnant and sweating in the heat, halfway around Lauren had stopped to rest on a bench. The view was so familiar to her that she almost didn’t notice the triangular thing, sticking up in the middle of the lake like a skeletal hand, pointing. What was it? At first, she thought it might have been the mast of a sunken boat. As she stared, shading her eyes with one hand, another walker approached.