He straightens. ‘Well right now, we need to feed this little bird. We need dog kibble, boiled eggs, and sugar water.’ A small feeling of pride at having achieved something.

‘What’s dog kibble?’ she asks, her attention moving back to the little bird that needs her love just to survive.

‘Dog kibble is food for dogs.’

‘We don’t have a dog, Daddy.’

‘Right.’ For the thousandth time he regrets that they picked a site so far from civilization. Amazon doesn’t even deliver out here, and Tom has to collect mail from a tiny shop that only opens twice a week in a village ten miles across terrain that he’s sure is annihilating the suspension on their Mercedes with every trip.

‘Let’s try the egg yolks and water, shall we?’ he offers at last.

‘We have eggs?’ Gaia asks brightly. She had a sneaky egg once at a friend’s house and it was delicious.

Tom doesn’t respond. The eggs belong to Maren – gifted from a farmer on the other side of the fjord – but he’s sure she can manage without one on this occasion. ‘We’ll get dog kibble later this afternoon, OK?’

‘Will that be too late?’ Gaia asks. He tells her no, it’ll be fine, and proceeds to rifle through the cupboards for a cappuccino cup in which to hold the egg. His movements are too clumsy and he sends a glass toppling to the floor, where it shatters. Gaia screams and Coco laughs. He finds a small dish, but in his haste to retrieve it from the cupboard he sends a mug to the floor. Another almighty crash, ceramic on tile. The mug is one of Aurelia’s, and even as he glances down and spies the duck-egg blue fragments rearranged like a modernist sculpture he recalls taking her that very mug, filled with steaming hot tea, whilst she nursed Coco in bed. He feels tears of anger prick his eyes. He wants to punch something.

‘Is everything all right?’ a voice asks.

He twists from his stooped position over the glass – he’s picking up shards with his bare hands before Coco can plant one of her knees or palms on them – to see a girl in the doorway. Sophie, the nanny. She looks dishevelled, her black hair sticking out like that bloke from The Cure and a purple bra strap visible from where her nightie has slipped down one shoulder. He wonders if he should ask her about this sad lady nonsense. She’ll be able to explain it.

But in the handful of seconds that he’s been distracted Coco has padded across to the shattered mug and glass, and Sophie lunges forward, scooping her up right as Coco makes for a jagged shard of glass sitting up from the floor like a stalagmite.