Malin and the children were sitting at the kitchen table. Thanks to her obsession with establishing routines, she’d decided they would attend summer school. Dan had yet to appear. Malin knew he’d had a headache during the night and had slept badly. This was nothing unusual; he’d suffered from migraine attacks on a fairly regular basis ever since they first met. However, he’d never had to endure them without pain relief. She couldn’t shake off the feeling of horror that spread through her body when she thought about what all this was doing to him. Maybe this isolation was taking more of a toll on Dan than on the children.

They had to make sure he didn’t draw them into the trap along with him. If there was any possibility of escape.

We have nowhere to hide.

‘I don’t understand this.’

Her son threw his pen across the table and sulked, his head drooping over his maths book.

Malin took a deep breath. She mustn’t lose her temper. Not before lunch, or it would be a really bad day.

‘Let’s go over it one more time,’ she said. ‘Watch how I do it.’

School in the middle of summer. Just to make the time pass.

The children hated not seeing their friends, having only each other, and Malin hated being their teacher. Yet still she was driven by the need to create structure in their everyday lives, to achieve a kind of balance of terror.

All three of them were equally miserable, particularly as the sun came out and the temperature inside the house began to rise.

Malin had tried countless times to work out what they were a part of. She thought about the phones they’d been forced to give up, the emails they’d been forced to write – a few short lines to friends and family who got in touch. They must all believe the move to Australia had taken place. More emails to cancel planned meetings in Australia. They’d been too afraid to protest, they’d simply done as they were told. Malin had realised that it didn’t matter who contacted them; the man would always have something appropriate to say. He would send his own emails and text messages. How long would it take before someone other than Noah (because surely he must know that something had happened?) reacted and sounded the alarm. The family was supposed to be away for a year; very few of their friends had expressed a desire to come and visit.

A year.

They could be gone for a whole year before it became obvious they weren’t in Australia.

We’ll never survive, Malin thought. And then:

What’s supposed to happen to us during that year?