‘Oh no you don’t, my lovely,’ Sophie tells Coco, who wriggles and squirms to be down, as though hell-bent on finding anything with which she might injure herself. Like Aurelia, he thinks, and his mood spirals into shame.

‘Come on, girls,’ Sophie tells Coco and Gaia. ‘Let’s go play while Daddy sorts out that mess.’

‘Are you sure?’ he asks Sophie. It’s Sunday. It’s her day off, and suddenly it strikes him that the reason she looks so – untethered – is because she’s catching up on sleep. It’s how Aurelia started to look on weekends. Go back to bed, he’d tell her, and she’d give him a look of deep gratitude before returning to their bedroom and staying there until evening.

‘Yep,’ Sophie says, throwing him a smile. A yawn catches her by surprise.

‘But Dora,’ Gaia says, and proceeds to tell Sophie all about the nestling they found, and how she desperately needs water and dog food, and please can Sophie save her, please, please?

Tom fetches the vacuum cleaner when he concedes that they mustn’t own a dustpan and brush and sucks up the broken glass and mug while Sophie and Gaia endeavour to revive Dora. A chorus of squeals and claps indicates that the bird has taken a few sips. Gaia is crying, Sophie hugs her tightly, and a great wave of gratitude rolls over him.

‘I’ll get dressed,’ he hears Sophie tell Gaia. ‘And we’ll go find Dora’s mum. Deal?’

Gaia nods, swiping tears from her cheeks. ‘Deal.’

An odd indignity warms him, and before he can exert any self-control he’s striding towards Sophie and murmuring that the mother bird will likely reject its nestling given that it’s been handled by humans. ‘Look, I think it’s kinder if we just tell Gaia the truth,’ he says. ‘It’s going to die whatever we do.’

‘Oh, no,’ Sophie says. ‘That’s just an old wives’ tale. The rejected-because-of-human-smell thing.’ She smiles to show she’s not interested in proving him wrong but that the possibility of the nestling being restored to the nest – and thus, pleasing Gaia infinitely – is in their mutual interests.

He grimaces, looks away. He doesn’t like being wrong.

Later, when he overhears Gaia’s happy chatter from the playroom, relief catches him by surprise.

On his desk, a photograph of Aurelia smiles back. She has her arms wrapped around a tree, her hair sweeping away from her and that smile, her beautiful smile that deflected from so much darkness and turmoil, beaming out of the frame like the north star. He can hear her voice, clear as a bell.

Oh Tom, she says sadly. Why did you do it, Tom?

   11   

THE FELLING

Then