‘She … can’t walk properly,’ Lauren says. The young woman wears nothing but the dressing gown that slides down one shoulder. Lauren has never seen someone so naked before. Fear pulls close around her. She draws her feet up on the seat and sticks her woollen knees against her chin. ‘Dad?’ They should help; she knows they should.

The woman has reached the bonnet, her shadow in the headlights stretching over the small stones of the road. The black pines are thick on either side.

‘It’s OK, love, it’s—’ Niall’s heavy jacket rustles as he shifts in his seat. ‘Stay here.’

Lauren pulls her vampire cape over her head. She feels her father touch her shoulder, then the spring of suspension as he opens the door to leave the truck. Her cape lifts when the door slams. ‘Dad,’ she whispers, her tongue parched as a leaf. She hears his workman’s boots, heavy on the ground. Then there is no sound except her breath against the plastic of her cape. She opens her eyes, then closes them and it is the same black. She imagines she is shrinking smaller, very small, and the cape spreads into bat wings, growing from her back. She needs to fly out of the window, the same colour as the night.

This does not happen. She listens to her own breathing as her skin grows clammy, then lifts the cape to see her father standing in front of the bonnet, holding the strange woman’s body to his. The woman is so much smaller than him, her shoulders narrow. Her girlish face is turned towards the windproof fabric of his chest and he looks straight down at her, pulling in his chin, running his rough hand over her wild hair, his own ponytail trailing from his ski hat. Lauren fidgets in her seat and makes a quiet sound that is not the same as crying.

Niall leads the woman by a thin arm to Lauren’s side of the truck. She looks in at the passenger window and right through Lauren, her face gaunt and moon-coloured. Lauren’s bones feel cold. Niall moves his hand, signalling that Lauren should shift over to the driver’s seat. He opens the passenger door and the woman climbs in with the cold air, shaking, but her expression does not show it. For the ride home, Lauren sits on Niall’s knee, behind the steering wheel. It is cramped and quiet. The fan heater covers the windows in steam.

‘Not far from home,’ Niall says as the headlamps search the road in front of them. ‘We’ll get you home. Up the road.’ He taps the sides of the steering wheel and drives slowly up the wooded hill to their house.