She felt the carriage jolt and immediately her cheeks were burning. She couldn’t pretend to be sleeping now – her head had lurched – but she could pretend to be unaware of where she was. As the train juddered she sat upright, hand to her head, pretending not to know she’d been sleeping on his shoulder, her face almost on his chest. She opened her eyes and stretched her legs into the aisle. Holly was facing out of the window with sunglasses on her head. Piotr wasn’t moving beside her. She swallowed, then laughed.

‘Sorry,’ she smiled, turning to him.

He wasn’t smiling, but he was looking at her. His eyes seemed soft, different. He shook his head gently. She could still feel the warmth of his chest on her cheek. She put her hand to her face, turned the gesture into one of pushing her hair back.

‘Where are we?’ she said.

‘Scotland,’ he replied. ‘We’re in Scotland.’

And suddenly she saw it, the hills and mountains of cloud, purple, grey, lines of gold layering the sky in a way that she’d never seen before. She leaned closer to the window – her arm pressing against Piotr’s, but that didn’t seem to matter any more – so that she could get a better view. There was a fence to the right, criss-crossed beams that had fallen into disrepair, and their weathered wood was topped with pristine snow. A sheep looked up at the train as they passed, its black face pretty and petite amid its tattered and muddy-white fleece.

‘We’re north of Edinburgh? We’re nearly there?’

Piotr shrugged, and then Holly replied.

‘We’ve passed Pitlochry,’ she said. ‘We’re heading for the Cairngorms.’

Eva smiled. She’d been wrong to imagine they were on opposite sides. She liked Holly. Holly made her feel better. There was no need to argue with her. And the sky really was extraordinary. It was years since she’d really looked at the sky. That was another thing that her mum had made her do.

Sitting outside together, Eva and her mum, late into the night, both of them aware that there wasn’t much time left, giving themselves this moment to lie back and look up at the full moon and see craters and ravines despite the hazy orange glow of London in the distance.

‘Sometimes I wonder,’ her mum said, sitting up. ‘I wonder if we’ve been tricked.’