It’s been a month since Aurelia first arrived at the site. She’s grown used to Granhus, and the finishing touches Tom has added in the form of new sofas, books, and a toy room have made it homely. He had the old boiler fixed so she can have hot baths every night if she wants to, and the Aga is actually brilliant – it really does heat the whole house, even a place as big and as draughty as Granhus.

Still, she hasn’t felt right since Coco was born. No, not since then – since she came to this wild place on the edge of the cliff. She WhatsApps her friends back home often – miserable out here, send gin – and is more serious than they think. If she was back in London, meeting up with Dulcie and Saffy and their new babies, or at her mother’s house in Oxford, being fussed over and ordered to take long hot baths every night (‘it soothes the soul, darling’), maybe she wouldn’t feel as … hollow. As though the world is black and white, devoid of smell, taste, and texture.

And then there are the weird dreams she keeps having.

She looks at herself in the long mirror in the corner of the bedroom. She’s still in her nightdress, her blonde hair wild and tangled, her face bare. When did she last wear make-up, or proper clothes? She can’t remember.

Tom keeps asking if she’s all right, and the answer’s always the same. Of course I am. We’re building our dream home! It’s amazing. And she smiles, and performs herself as she usually is: happy, focused, full of plans. But something has changed. She can feel a darkness settling inside her bones, a fog veiling her thoughts. The midwife would say it’s postnatal depression, but she’s sure it’s not. She has had low days like everyone else, but this is something completely new, beyond the scope of her new-baby new-house situation. When did it happen? She glances outside at the untrammelled view of the fjord, and the answer crystallizes: it was when Tom cut down the trees.

She recalls the morning when she’d stood, right in this very spot, holding a mug of tea in one hand and Coco in her other arm, looking down at Tom felling the first tree. A big gnarled thing with a hollow in the middle, like a mouth, two branches crooked out at either side like arms. A storybook tree. The trunk was six feet wide. Hours later, Tom emerged drenched in sweat and exhausted, as though he’d had to box the tree down with his bare hands. He held up a jar of the sap: so dark it resembled blood. ‘The king of the forest is conquered,’ he’d said with a grin.