‘What are you –’

‘I think I’ve had some sort of episode,’ she says in barely a whisper. She brings her knees to her chest and stares at them. No impressions where she knelt on the gravel. Not a single speck of dirt on them. Goosebumps erupt up and down her arms.

‘We …’ Kelly says, thrown. ‘You cooked a curry. Todd played on his X-Box.’

‘No pumpkin carving?’

She hears Kelly shift the phone closer to his mouth. ‘I thought you were going to do that tonight. Remember, you said you couldn’t be arsed …’

‘Right,’ she says faintly, picturing how perfectly that pumpkin turned out, how he had looked at it.

She stands and stares at herself in the mirror. She looks haggard, but that is nothing new. Thin skin around her eyes, the hallmark of over-forty. A hunted look that she hasn’t seen before. More than ever, she wonders what happened to the girl who met Kelly at the pedestrian crossing in 1999.

‘Right, I better go,’ she says. Kelly tries to interject, but she cuts him off, hangs up the phone. She needs to figure this out, alone, before she gets certified by her husband or son.

She leaves the bathroom and goes down to the kitchen, stopping dead in the hallway. A whole, un-carved pumpkin sits on the side. ‘Oh,’ Jen says to nobody, a tiny hiccough of a word, a giant syllable of understanding. She approaches the pumpkin as though it is an unexploded bomb and turns it around, but it’s whole and firm and cool beneath her finger tips and Jesus Christ last night didn’t happen. It didn’t fucking happen.

Despite herself, something light moves across Jen’s chest. She is a lottery winner, a bullet dodger, a pardoned criminal. It was a dream, a hallucination … nothing. No. It must have been a vivid dream.

Todd is upstairs, getting ready. Kelly is finishing the flooring job he actually finished yesterday. And Jen is here, having not carved a pumpkin, but having gone mad instead.

And that’s when the thought arrives, fully formed. What if the weapon is in that bag? What if the bullet hasn’t been dodged? What if the crime is going to happen? What if it was a premonition? The entire lived day, leading up to that horrible moment on the landing?

Jen goes hot and then cold. Exactly the same as she did when she diagnosed herself with epilepsy earlier today. It’s probably anxiety. Made up, made up, made up.

Still, she glances up the stairs. Todd’s in the shower. She can hear the water.

She grabs the rucksack. Not in eighteen years of parenting has she gone through his things, but she does today. It’s worth it. For her peace of mind or his, she isn’t sure.

Front pockets, side pockets. Tuneless shower singing.

There are two folders and a pencil case in his bag, so adorably infantile something unspools in Jen’s chest.

The water begins to run. He’ll be ages. Sprucing up.