She remembered Sam in the labour suite at the county hospital in Stoke the day Billy was born. How strange and silly he’d looked, standing awkwardly over her as he watched her face contort in pain with each contraction, unable to soothe or offer any comfort other than his presence, and the squeezing of her clawed fingers with his big rough hand. He made gags that made her mad, since laughing was sore and broke her concentration, and he looked like he wanted to be somewhere else, somewhere very far away from all this pain and blood.

And then when Billy came slipping and sliding out, a purple-and-white wrinkled scream of a thing, Sam had been transformed, his restless nervousness replaced by a man made of granite, and he watched silently as Billy was freed from the cord that linked him to his mother and was placed at her breast. Katie was panting through her teeth with relief and joy at the touch and sight of their child, and when she looked up at her silent Sam she saw that the man of granite was crying fit to flood the room. His cheeks were stained with salty tears and his eyes were already puffy and small. She’d held out a hand to him, and he took it.

‘Do you want to hold him?’

He looked at the nurse who took Billy and wrapped him in a white rigid sheet that did nothing to absorb the goo he was covered in, and handed him to the big weeping man. He held his son’s tiny body in his arms and looked at him as though Billy were telling him something very important no one else could hear. And then Sam had said in a whisper to the baby, ‘I’ll keep you so safe. So safe.’

The man who said that to both his children at their birth was a man who had meant it. To ask the grown version of that baby who had communed so closely with his father on his entrance to the world does it make your Daddy hurt you? seemed an obscenity. But she had asked it and it was done now.

Instead of the world crumbling with a rumble and a flash as she expected, there was a curious lightness on her chest and throat, as though the weight that had pressed down on her had been lifted with her dreadful words. Katie held Billy tight, waiting for the answer.

He trembled with a sob. ‘It wants to hurt us all.’

And then he wailed like he was being skewered, and she hugged him hard enough to break and told him not to worry, that nothing was going to hurt any of them. But when she calmed him back to a sob and they continued on to pick up Jess, she wasn’t sure that was true.