Once both girls are fast asleep, Aurelia heads outside to lay bowls of water near the river. When Tom told her about the dead animals that had drunk from the toxic river she was horrified. Tom had already looked into ways that they might undo any further damage to the wildlife, such as adding purifiers to the river to counter the effects of the foam compound, but there was little they could do immediately. The contractors had been notified, and a new culvert had been ordered – for now, she can only make these small supplications of water outside in the hope that some animals may be spared an agonizing death.

She groans when she notices yet more bodies heaped about the forest. Some are close to the river, winnowed now to a trickle through the undergrowth; the larger remains of foxes and badgers are further away. She’s uneasy about leaving them; perhaps they’ll attract wolves.

She tilts her head up to the sky, allowing this thought to unfold: she never imagined that her dream of building a summer home in Norway would result in poisoning a river source that has existed since the last Ice Age. She’s the sort of person who’ll carry a spider to safety from the bath tub rather than kill it, and yet here she is, standing over the bodies of rabbits and squirrels, all dead because of her.

She bends over the remains of a bird, one she hasn’t spotted before and yet one she recognizes. A corncrake. She knows it from the website Tom showed her of the critically endangered animals in the region. The little bronze streak on its face and underbelly. She closes her eyes, her stomach dropping. So now they’re sacrificing endangered species on the altar of their dream house. This was not how things were supposed to go.

As she makes to pick it up she feels something tug around her ankles. She’s stepped into a bindweed. She lifts a foot, but it won’t let go. She reaches down to rip it away, but can’t get a firm grasp, so she removes a glove. Her fingers do not meet a weed, but something that feels like a hand. She looks down and screams. Long fingers are grasping her ankles. She can’t see who is pulling her, but the grip is so strong she falls over. On the ground she kicks and beats with her fists, and when she turns her head she sees two more bodies lying by the corncrake. They are not animals, but her daughters, Coco and Gaia, curled up as though asleep.