She opened the back door and welcomed the pure air into her lungs, inhaling deeply and enjoying the sting of it on her teeth, the newness of such a clean cold spreading through her body. It would have been easy, looking at the sky directly overhead, to think it was a grey day, to think rain would soon pour from the textured layers of cloud, but that was only if you didn’t look down. Near the horizon – which from Declan’s back garden was beyond an expanse of water that reflected the hazy snow-covered hills in the distance – the clouds thinned out, became wisps and ribbons that let the golden light through.

Reading the file last night, she had seen it immediately – and she’d known that Piotr had seen it too, from the way his breath fell from his lips. Freida predicted that, after the first few generations, approximately 1 in 200 pouch pregnancies could end in some form of late-term miscarriage. It was the same. The statistics were the same. For the pouch as for natural birth. Piotr had shouted those statistics at her once, and in the weeks, the months and years afterwards, she tortured herself with them. She had blamed herself, for a long time, for choosing the risk of nature over the safety of science.

But now she’d seen the proof. The risks were the same.

It was almost difficult, letting go of that blame. But this morning that was what she was going to do.

As she walked further into the garden her footsteps left the only marks that were on the snow-covered lawn, each one sinking several inches through to reveal the promise of fresh green grass. She held her arms wide, closed her eyes and tilted her head back so that the whole world became the expanse of air, the silence of dawn in the Highlands. She turned like that, eyes still closed, not spinning as she would have done as a child, but taking her time to turn in a deliberate circle, with the touch of ice on her face.

When she opened her eyes, she saw Holly at the window. She raised an arm in a stationary wave, and Holly did the same.

The clouds near the horizon were edged in silver and copper now, revealing the sun as a globe of light, magical in the haze of snow about to fall. As Eva walked back to the house, her return footsteps followed beside her outgoing ones, making it look as though two people had walked together, one striding straight ahead, and the other moving slowly backwards, eyes fixed on where she had been.

When she got to the door, Piotr opened it for her. He was dishevelled, like he’d just woken up and come to find her. He was watching her as though she was everything in the world.

There was snow on her shoes. In her hair.