Please be OK, Sean. Whatever you’ve done, whatever has happened between us, whoever you’ve chosen over me, I don’t want it to end like this.

From somewhere over towards the village, the wailing two-tone siren of a fire engine reached us.

Hurry up.

The fire danced on, smoke darkening against the blue sky. The wind shifted for a moment, pushing clouds of smoke back towards us, burning throats and making us blink back tears. My head began to pound from breathing it in.

It can only have been a minute, maybe less, before there was movement again at the edge of the smoke, coalescing suddenly into real flesh and blood. A figure. An adult.

Russ stumbled out of the smoke with Odette clutched tight in his arms.

Rowan ran behind him, holding her T-shirt to her mouth and nose, following them up the hill until all three of them collapsed next to us in a heap of panting, crying, coughing relief. Rowan tried to gently loosen Odette’s grip on her father to check her over, but Odette was attached to Russ like a limpet, as if her very life depended on it.

Sean was the last to appear, an arm out in front of him against the choking smoke. He staggered up the hill and collapsed, exhausted, next to me, pulling the T-shirt down from his mouth.

‘Is everybody out?’ he gasped, trying to catch his breath. ‘Did everyone get out?’

‘Think so.’

‘Good,’ he said. ‘You all OK?’

‘We are. Just need to get some water for the kids, and Lucy will need to have her ankle looked at.’

I turned to look at him properly. His face and torso were smeared with dirt and shiny with sweat, his eyes wild and bloodshot, and both his knees were cut and bleeding. There were small vertical scratches on his chest and high up on his right cheek.

He coughed hard and spat on the ground.

‘Sean?’ I said more quietly.

Staring hard into the flames, eyes wide, he didn’t seem to hear me.

‘Sean?’ I said again.

His head snapped around to look at me.

‘What?’

‘Are you OK? You’re bleeding.’

He waved a hand dismissively and I noticed that he was shaking with adrenaline.

‘It’s nothing. Fell into a bloody bush, couldn’t see where I was going. Can barely see your hand in front of your face down there now.’

We stared at the fire for a moment, mesmerised by the flames.

‘Christ,’ he said under his breath, ‘how the hell did it all start, anyhow?’

‘Good question.’ My throat was raw and my head was pounding so hard I could barely think straight. But I remembered now what had struck me when I first saw the flames – I just didn’t know what it meant. Not yet.

*