5:56.

The alarm would sound in four minutes. For four minutes, Sarah turned her eyes towards her sleeping family – peaceful, entwined, shielded by her and David’s force-field of beliefs. For four minutes she watched them this way, and breathed them in; and by 6am she had changed her mind again. Because what on Jupiter was she thinking? What ridiculous notion had made her consider abandoning everything she believed in – honesty, right. In pursuit of what? The winning of a petty, childish game. No, she wouldn’t do it, she would ‘rise above it’, as usual. There were other ways to protect Amelia. Spirits didn’t send storms to pleasantly confirm good choices. They were fury-fuelled means of intervention, warnings to decease.

At breakfast, Amelia and Harry were entranced by the goings-on in the garden. Half a month’s rain had fallen in an hour and the long summer grass swam beneath a veritable pool on top. The sight of it induced in Sarah’s mind visions of her parents’ dilapidated swimming pool, but she forced her attention instead to the train timetable on her phone. While she searched for a running line, Harry persuaded David to open the garden door and he dashed outside in his nappy and t-shirt, consenting only later to wellies. Amelia, more restrained in her neat school uniform, stood just inside, pointing out the deepest sections of water for her brother to jump in. Both of them giggled, tickled and surprised by the workings of the world.

“Nothing’s on time,” Sarah said, glancing up to David. “It’s going to take me hours to get in.”

“Work from home?” David suggested.

“Can’t. Meetings.”

He nodded and called the kids back to the table, where he had arranged smiley berry faces on the tops of their porridge. “So, what’s on the agenda today?” he asked them all.

“It’s drama with Mrs Burke,” volunteered Amelia, fastidiously scooping her porridge from the outmost edges, working slowly in on the smile. “And we’re finishing our Matisse collages. And it’s spellings.”

“And Harry has music group,” added David. “Followed by a very important nap.”

“And I have a closing statement,” finished Sarah, allowing herself to shift focus for a moment to the case she should have given far more attention over the past weeks. It was unlike her to be so distracted and she wondered if she’d done enough, or if she’d let Veronica control that too. The case came down to a call of ethics rather than precedent in the end, the spirit rather than the letter of the law. But surely the judge would do the right thing, just as she had that morning conceded to. Surely entrenched values would stand firm, like a protective shield around them.

Later, statement made – in the end rather convincingly – and umbrella in hand, Sarah wondered how she had made it back to Veronica’s road. And why.

It was lunchtime and Veronica wouldn’t even be there, she would be at school, with Amelia. But something about the pretty, Primrose house had drawn Sarah away from her office in the middle of the pouring day, and back to it, as though it was the scene of something important, or would be. As though it was the ground upon which lightning had struck.