‘No, Eloïse.’ His tone was sharp now. ‘This is not a game that I can let you join in, the way I did when we were children. Leave me alone. I want you to go away.’

Go away. From the barn? Or from the farm? I didn’t ask. I knew the answer.

Without a word I walked away, out into the night where the air was silky soft on my skin and carried the salty scent of the marshes and the high-pitched whine of mosquitoes. I left my brother alone in the barn. With his hunting rifle. With the stench of death in every breath he took.

*

I lay awake all night. Hour after hour. Ears alert to the slightest sound, the faintest whisper, expecting the roar of a rifle at every moment. The night was long and oppressively hot. I lay naked in bed, legs tangled in the sheet, arms flung wide, and when my thoughts grew too heavy to hold inside my head I stood at the window and peered out into the blackness. Seeing shadows within shadows, imagining movement where there was none. I needed facts not phantoms so, despite Léon’s warning, I would head into town when it was light.

An hour before dawn I heard men’s voices outside, low and secretive, the words too tight together for me to catch, but I recognised them as belonging to my father and my brother, and felt a hefty kick of relief in my chest. They were safe. Both safe. Below me in the kitchen their voices rumbled for a few minutes, then I heard noises on the stairs. Unfamiliar sounds. I was slow to make sense of them, my mind sluggish with exhaustion, but the sound was slow, laborious, full of effort; a dragging, scraping, arduous sound. It was my brother hauling his damaged body up the stairs. I tried not to picture it, but failed.

I pulled on a light robe, stood close to the old oak door and didn’t breathe. I could hear his grunts of pain. The curses under his breath. I matched them with my own, curse for curse. Finally he reached the landing and the tap of his crutches on the floorboards came nearer. Tap, slide; tap, slide; tap, slide, until he was outside my door, where he halted. For four minutes he stood there in silence, no more than a hand’s breadth from me and when I could bear it no longer I swung open the door. It was a mistake. André must have been leaning against it, gathering his strength after the climb, because he stumbled into my room and would have fallen to the floor if I hadn’t wrapped my arms around him and held him on his feet.

‘I apologise,’ he said awkwardly. ‘I didn’t mean to disturb you.’