Oh God. She realized in her confusion she must have come out of a different exit and taken a bus going the wrong way. Oh God. Where even was she?

She wobbled downstairs and jumped off the bus in a panic before she got even farther away from home. She was standing in the freezing cold, with a rapidly decreasing phone battery, alongside a housing estate. She followed it, trying to pull up a map on her phone—and gradually she recognized where she was.

Ormiston. Why did she recognize that name? Ormiston. She sniffed.

Of course. His favorite tree. And now he was gone, all the way to the other side of the earth, unimaginably far.

She stumbled forward. Where was it? She could shelter under it and call a cab, surely. There must be one somewhere, but her hands were too cold to press on the phone and the battery was running out.

Increasingly chilled and starting to get frightened in the dark, as the streetlights popped on above her, she couldn’t figure out what to do. Federico could drive out and get her, but he needed to be there with the children. Her thin woolen gloves were not helpful, especially as she kept having to take them off to try her phone. Her hair was covered in white flakes; her cheeks, streaked with tears.

She stumbled down the track, remembering the instructions: keep left. The snow was higher than her boots; she was starting to shiver. It was so dark, just the lights from remote houses leading her on through a wooded lane, deeper and deeper.

Finally, in the fading light, she turned her head around to a path stretching to the left—and she saw it.

There was the tree—huge, broad, all-encompassing—ahead of her. It was beautiful, extraordinary.

She would sit inside, she told herself sensibly, even though it was not at all a sensible thing to do and, sleep-deprived and chilled, she was not thinking remotely sensibly, which would be to get out of the snow and the wind, use her phone properly, and figure out how to get home. She could go home and head into her little bedroom and maybe take the baby for a cuddle and cry a lot. If the baby was crying at the same time, well, all to the good. Then she would make some hot chocolate and pretend it was for the children. Another run on The Muppet Christmas Carol might not go amiss.

She felt, absurdly, like the Little Match Girl, but without a match to light.