She nods. Intellectually, she’s aware everything is OK. OK, in the sense that right now they’re sitting in a park, and she can hear one daughter laughing and her other daughter snoring against Tom’s chest. But the reality is that everything is not OK, and certainly not today. Today she is not in a park but in a void that’s midnight-black. She is not a mother, not a wife, but a speck of nothingness floating in that vast, empty void. There is no horizon, no chink of light, no end to the nothingness. And she has no words to communicate this.

But when Tom slides his arm across her shoulders the sudden human contact restores her words just long enough for her to frame the terror she’s living inside.

‘I feel like I want to die,’ she says.

Tom stares at her, mouth open. He doesn’t know what to say.

‘Mumma! Look! Look what I can do!’

They both watch as Gaia hooks her legs from a bar on the climbing frame and dangles upside down, laughing.

‘That’s great, pudding,’ Tom calls out, his voice breaking. ‘Careful you don’t fall. That’s enough now.’

Coco jerks awake as he shouts, her pale eyes flinging open and glancing around in shock. She sees her mother, feels the thump-thump of her father’s heartbeat beneath his sweater and promptly falls back to sleep.

‘Why did you do it, Tom?’ Aurelia asks.

He starts. ‘Do what?’

‘The build.’

‘Is that why you feel like this?’

She nods. Then, realizing this isn’t the cause at all, shakes her head. ‘I don’t know,’ she whispers. ‘I don’t know what’s wrong.’ A chink in the darkness to admit it. Within seconds the darkness engulfs her again in its smothering, measureless terror.

‘How long have you felt like this?’ Tom asks gently.

‘Since … since you cut down the tree. And then all the animals dying after drinking from the river. It’s just got worse every day. I can’t bear it.’ Another tear rolls down her face. This time she wipes it away. ‘I can’t bear being alive.’

He nods, processing this. His wife is suicidal. In a park, while their oldest daughter laughs and plays with new friends, and their baby girl snoozes adorably against his chest. He figures he knows the real reason. Two days ago, Basecamp was destroyed during a storm. The storm was only half of it – the river was the real cause. When he’d redirected the river, it had actually dispersed through the site, turning the ground soggy and collapsing the foundations. The house they dreamed of, designed, built, and got into serious debt for, is destroyed, and he’s not even sure they can claim anything on the insurance for it. Maybe fifty per cent, but they’ll still have a black hole in their finances and nothing to show for it.