Downstairs half bath: I make sure there’s no water on the floor to slip on. I check for chemicals, cleaning supplies under the sink, and find none. Sally must have done a sweep already. Those carved Norman arches feel much too low today. Somebody could smack their head, but at least it wouldn’t be one of the kids.

The conservatory doors are already locked, but I still drag a chair over to block the way. We are not setting foot inside an all-glass room today.

Upstairs: tidy away anything that can be tripped on. I take down a large painting of a horse that never sat right on its hook. The children play near it, and if it fell …

Nothing I can do about the TV or the china cabinet or the children’s bookshelves upstairs.

I stop on the stairs and try to, try to, try to breathe.

The boot room. The guns. Oh my God, there’s so much.

I mustn’t run, but I do hurry, around to the far end of the house, nearly tripping over a sleeping Max in my haste. When I open the boot room door, he jumps up and runs in circles, thinking we’re going for a walk.

Ignoring him, I scour the shelves—the random tools have been tidied away. The old shotguns are still on their stands. No worries there, I guess; when we first moved here, I asked about shooting skeet, half joking, and Hugh said they’d been out of bullets for them since he was a teenager.

Hugh does, however, have ammunition for the Enfield No. 2 revolver one of the Treadways brought home after fighting in the Second World War. The box of bullets was a wedding present from one of his boarding school friends, a strange and macabre gift, I’d thought then, and now even more so. It must have been a joke about the Day, the kind only an outsider would make. A nonbeliever. Doesn’t matter, though; the Enfield’s gone, tidied away.

Between Hugh and Sally, this house is as danger-proofed as it can be. It’s so old, though, such a Frankenstein’s monster of a house. I’m not sure which would be most likely to collapse—the wing that’s been slowly sinking into Lute’s soil for a thousand years or the extensions that were popped up a century ago. Nothing and nowhere is safe.

I sit on the floor of the mudroom, gathering my knees to my chest until I can’t take Max’s attempts to lick me anymore. I use his back to hoist myself upright and head out the mud-spattered boot room door without him. He jumps up and peers through the window at me, despondent, but I can’t be responsible for him bounding around right now.

I can barely breathe.