‘Come and see what I’ve found in the shed.’

The sound of Tom’s voice makes her drop the mug she was holding and it shatters across the floor in a dozen pieces. He rushes forward to gather up the pieces with a dustpan before she steps on them in her bare feet.

‘Are you all right?’ he says, laughing. ‘Didn’t mean to scare you.’

She recovers, smiles, though her heart is racing. She can still feel the burn of her cheek from where dream-Tom slapped her. The crack in her heart.

‘I found this massive thing in the shed,’ he says, before she can mention the dream. He tips shards of mug into the bin. ‘Do you want to come and see?’

She raises her eyes to the ceiling. ‘What about the girls?’

‘It’ll only take a minute,’ he says.

She slips on her padded coat and a pair of Tom’s wellies and traipses after him out the back door towards the old woodshed at the rear of the house. It’s barely eight in the morning and the forest is carpeted in snow, but it’s unseasonably mild, sunlight picking its way through the towering pine trees all around the house.

‘Be very careful,’ Tom says as he approaches the door to the shed. He holds out a hand and she wonders for a moment if a wolf or lynx has got trapped inside. No. He’d have locked her in the house with the girls if that were the case, and taken down a shotgun. She watches, nervous and excited, as he digs his mobile phone out of his back pocket, switches on the torch and shines it inside the shed.

She follows after and watches the light as he shines it towards the ceiling.

‘There,’ he whispers, grinning. ‘Isn’t that incredible?’

At first she thinks she’s looking at a ceiling lamp, a kind of Frank Gehry-esque ceiling lamp, cone-ish in shape, about the size of a medicine ball and patterned with art deco swirls in peach and mauve. With horror, she realizes what it is, and takes a step back in case its inhabitants wake and come seething out in a frenzy.

‘Hornets!’ she hisses at Tom, grabbing on to his arm.

‘Wasps, most likely,’ he whispers back, not taking his eyes off the cone.

‘I’ll call pest control,’ she says, inching backwards, not daring to tear her eyes away from it.

‘Shame,’ Tom says.

She looks at him as if he’s gone mad, so he explains. ‘Well, it’s beautiful, isn’t it? A perfect papier-mâché cone made by thousands of tiny creatures.’ To her horror, he reaches up to trace it dreamily with his fingertips. ‘It’s a work of natural art, the texture of papyrus. Like finding something from an ancient world.’

‘You won’t be saying that if they sting you,’ she says.