Like a parent in a crisis, Cathy ushers them all out into the rain and into her cold car.

She turns on the old heater and drives them half a mile down the road in silence, then pulls over. She reaches up to turn on the interior light. Joe watches her movements, deliberate and slow. He can’t cope. He can’t cope. He’s panicking.

‘Shit,’ she says. She kills the engine. ‘What did she say, exactly?’

Joe repeats it, word for word, glad to be giving it to Cathy, this problem that weighs too heavily on his shoulders.

He looks at the back of Frannie’s neck from his position in the back seat. Her ears stick out more than they used to. His stomach rolls over in fear for her. He wishes she would eat. She didn’t touch any of the cheese and crackers tonight, had only water. Unlike him. He had about sixty crackers. A kilo of cheese.

‘How big are the woods?’ Frannie says to Cathy. Their faces are distorted by the overhead light, grotesque shadows forming from their noses.

‘I need to get out,’ Joe says. Cathy’s car has no rear-passenger doors, and he bangs impatiently on the back of her seat.

‘All right, all right,’ Cathy says, getting out and holding open the door for him. They stand there, by the side of the road, in the glow of the headlights, as they did a week ago.

‘A fucking development,’ he says hoarsely to her.

‘It might not be where we – where we … put him.’

‘Of course it will,’ he says. He leans his hands on the top of the car. He’s going to be sick. It’s a panic attack. ‘Of course it will. This is – this is … fate.’

‘You need to calm down,’ Cathy says.

‘It’s better this way,’ Frannie says faintly. They’re in the complete darkness of the countryside, standing on the road on which they used to walk home from school. The same sibling dynamics at play but in a different situation, an unimaginable situation.

‘There is nothing we can do,’ Cathy says. ‘We just need to sit tight.’ She gets out her phone and types something. ‘Look,’ she says, showing them a website. ‘It can take ages from planning application to first build.’

Joe takes the phone from her and reads the article. ‘Or not much time at all,’ he says. ‘It says here it varies.’ He wants to throw the phone on the soil, suddenly. That fucking man from the market. Frannie’s fucking late-night trip for wine. How did they end up here?

‘It’s not bureaucratic,’ Joe says. ‘Not like here.’

‘It will still take time,’ Cathy says.

‘But then what?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘We need to go back over there and move it.’

Cathy scoffs. ‘I think that is the worst idea you’ve ever come up with.’

They stand in silence for a few minutes.

‘Do you dream about him?’ Frannie asks.

‘Yeah, I dream about him,’ Cathy says quietly.