I was hyper-alert and rigid with terror, my eyes locked on the shadows outside my bedroom window. I tried to wrestle the scene in the kitchen into some kind of sense. I had seen this woman a few times, now, and if Gaia had seen her too, then I wasn’t hallucinating. But that didn’t necessarily mean she was a shade from the Underworld, sent to torment us for the wrongs of our fathers. No, it meant that quite possibly she was some drifter who was kipping underneath the house, along with the thousand or so insects and rodents that preferred the warm spots between the house and its foundations to the forest. I didn’t blame them. And I’d overheard Tom go on about something called ‘right to roam’, which was a big deal in Norway and meant that he couldn’t stick a private property sign anywhere on the site. He got really annoyed about that.

Of course, none of this rationale explained the state of the woman’s face, but it was dark – maybe I hadn’t seen properly. All I knew for sure was that I was going to protect these girls. That was my mission, and I had chosen to accept it.

All of this kind of reasoning helped me stop convulsing with fear, but didn’t make me sleepy in the least, so I picked up my laptop and began to work on my novel.

‘What are you doing?’ Gaia said after a few moments, disturbed by the light of my screen.

I looked up from my laptop and tried to find an answer that would simultaneously persuade her to go back to bed, fast. My brain wasn’t working, so she took my open-mouthed silence as a signal to skip across the room and peer into my laptop screen.

‘Are you sending an email?’ she asked. ‘About the Sad Lady?’

Her face was fixed in an earnest, utterly fearless expression. She meant the woman we’d both seen.

A deep sigh. ‘Why do you think she likes our house so much?’

‘Maybe it was her house,’ I said without thinking. Then, remembering that Gaia was only six and I should probably not scare her any further than she already was: ‘I think we’ve just been drawing too many scary pictures lately. There is no such thing as Sad Ladies or ghosts or anything like that, all right?’

Gaia gave me a flat stare. ‘You know full well she was there. In our kitchen. I’ve seen her loads of times.’

My face fell. ‘You have?’

She nodded. ‘And Mumma saw her too.’ A thought drifted into her head. ‘Do you think she scared Mumma so much that she ran away?’

I pulled her into a tight hug and rubbed her back. ‘I don’t think so, Gaia. I think sometimes people die and it’s just very sad.’

She was crying now. ‘Why did Mumma die?’