‘Look, Mrs Catto – Valentina – why don’t you sleep on it, both of you. I’m sure once you’ve had a chance to rest, things will feel different. Corinne will have a wonderful time here – all the exchange kids do. You may rest assured that we will take good care of her,’ she added.

‘I’m not sure if that’s—’

‘Please. I promise – everything will work out wonderfully. Why don’t you ring me in the morning and we’ll see where things stand? Hmm?’

It was a reasonable suggestion, and the other woman softly acquiesced. An instant later, the line went dead.

Abi put the phone down, her mind snagging on those words: something she told me tonight … But what?

‘She’s not coming?’ Beth asked, interrupting her thoughts.

There was her daughter at the top of the stairs, narrow ankles poking out from the ends of her pyjama legs, hair hanging lank and thin over her shoulders. Abi could hear the note of distress in the question.

‘Beth …’ she said, but the girl had already turned and fled back to her room. After a moment, Abi followed.

Beth’s bedroom overlooked the back garden. A second bed had been made up beneath the window for their guest, and as Abi looked around, she noticed other changes to the room. The Jellycat stuffed toys that usually lined the little mantelpiece were gone. So too were the dreamcatchers that had once slowly turned, suspended above the bed. Justin Bieber sulked and preened from the wall above; Billie Eilish on another wall, a tarantula crawling into her open mouth.

‘What if she doesn’t come?’ Beth said. ‘What if I’m the only one whose exchange doesn’t show up? Everyone already thinks I’m a freak—’

‘Shhh, come on now, enough of that. Who cares what people think?’ Abi said, adopting the same brisk tone of reassurance that lately she found herself using with all of them – Beth, Mark, Eva.

In the dimly lit room, her daughter’s face looked small and pale, a cross look marring her features. Beth was a worrier. A bed-wetter until the age of seven. An inveterate nail-biter. ‘She really feels her feelings,’ Mark used to say of her. Of their two daughters, Beth was the one that had always inspired the most anxiety within them.

Abi thought for a moment about reaching out to smooth Beth’s hair back from her face, or leaning in to kiss her cheek. But she did neither of these things. Instead, she hung back by the mantelpiece, her thumbnail leaving a crescent-moon indent in the flesh of her finger, as her eyes flickered over Beth’s face, trying to fathom the dark run of her thoughts.

‘It will all be fine,’ Abi reassured her, making her voice bright and as convincing as she could to hide the undercurrent of nerves. Backing out of the doorway, she said: ‘Now get some sleep.’