And then it was as if all along the deer had been attached by a thread to someone we couldn’t see. In the time it took to blink, its head went up and it disappeared, tugged away, becoming mist and trees.

Lottie gave a shiver and looked down. ‘My tea’s gone cold.’ I was standing dead still. She rubbed my arm like I’d just returned from a lengthy expedition to the Arctic. ‘Did you sleep?’

‘Bit hungover.’

‘I’m so glad you’re here.’ I opened three cupboards on a biscuit mission. ‘We’ll be all right, won’t we? Just do your own thing. We’ve tons of time, so you just say when you want to do something together, or if you want to be on your own, or—’

My sigh cut her off. ‘It’ll be fine. Just … relax.’

One for you Polly. Dadx

If I hadn’t known any better I’d have thought someone had been kidnapped and was being horribly tortured, probably with chainsaws and jaw-clamps and mace. But these were just the videos my little brother liked to send when he was away, especially when he was excited. His face was pushed right up to the camera, and he was screaming and blowing spit bubbles. His eye loomed towards the screen like an orbiting planet, voice alien-distorted, before Dad said ‘Benji, that’s enough now’ and the video stopped abruptly.

It would have been a bit much with him here. Good for Lottie to take a breather. And he liked it at Dad’s new place. When we dropped him off this time, Benji had wailed and pulled my sleeve, until Dad reminded him that the camp they were going to had a climbing wall and he’d be sleeping in a tree house. Dad had said he liked my new hair and he and Lottie exchanged a look, the one they always did these days. Like the other one was going to hit them really hard.

My eyes kept straying from my book. I was rubbish at concentrating at the moment. Had been for months – permanent brain-freeze. The words were like flotsam, slopping up against each other and off the page. All that quiet, and sky. It was more distracting than a whole load of people jumping up and down and shouting my name through megaphones. I put on my boots and stepped into the garden.

The mist had lifted a little but there was still a clamminess to the air. How could it be almost June? Everything was covered in gauze, a gauze that wrapped itself round and round my ears and face, blanketing out the sounds I should have been hearing – old school Balearic trash-beats and shrieking and puking, probably. Me and Stef had talked about doing a last-minute thing – Magaluf or Ibiza, cheap-as-chips apartment, skin-smacking sunshine. Until we ran.

The cottage owner was obviously into his gardening. Labels, written in a tiny, coiling hand, hung from the plants and read like name tags for a posh girls’ boarding school. Storm lavender. Mauve nepeta. Osmunda regalis. Even in the mist, the garden was insane with colour, the lawn hyper-green and glossy.