‘Nothing,’ I said, though my arm was a white-hot kind of agony. ‘All better now.’

‘Don’t leave,’ she whispered. ‘Please, Sophie. Please don’t die?’

‘I won’t,’ I said. ‘I promise.’

‘Pinky promise?’

‘What?’

She held out her little finger. ‘Pinky promise. You have to use your pinky. Like this.’

She demonstrated what I needed to do by hooking her pinky around mine.

And as I lay there in the darkness with Gaia clamped to me like a warm, snoring limpet, I felt a stab of guilt for the dozens of times I’d looked out of the window of the playroom at the woods and the fjord beyond and regretted what I’d signed up for. I’d even thought about running away. It wasn’t that I thought the girls weren’t sweet or that the landscape wasn’t mesmeric – I just felt so completely out of my depth.

And yet it seemed I was the only one vaguely interested in looking after Gaia and Coco. Already I had a sense that the other adults around them – Tom, Clive, and Maren – were fairly clueless in their own ways. After all, they’d hired me as a nanny, and while Tom was full of promises to sit and have dinner with us, or to read Gaia a bedtime story, he was perpetually distracted. He worked from dawn until dusk on the build, wafting into the house at odd moments to snatch a cup of coffee or a cigarette from the packet I noticed he kept hidden behind the toaster, before wafting back out into the gloom of the forest like a ghost. He didn’t appear to eat. Clive was fairly absent, too, but then he was only Tom’s business partner, and nothing to do with Gaia and Coco. I had forgotten he was staying at the house until I caught sight of him in the hall one morning. We exchanged a pleasant ‘hello’ and he went on his way.

Maren spent most of the time doing housework and ironing everything to within an inch of its life. I can still see her now at the ironing board amidst clouds of steam, sawing back and forth across curtains, towels, and table runners until they succumbed and became as flat as she desired. For all her effort, though, I have to say she wasn’t much of a housekeeper. Black mould crept along windowpanes, caterpillars of dust slept snug atop picture frames, and the girls’ washing was regularly stuffed into their drawers instead of being folded and laid neatly flat – rendering the over-zealous ironing pointless. I figured Maren’s strengths lay in baking bread, which she did every morning, filling the house with mouth-watering smells. She also spent an hour a day barking Norwegian nouns at Gaia.

Why bring Gaia and Coco out here at all. I wondered? There was nothing for them to do beyond the dour realms of the creepy red house: no parks or play areas, no trampoline or dodgy wooden swing in the garden. Just past the trees towards the cliff men in work clothes and hard hats shouted and drilled all day long.