It came back suddenly, the image which visited her in nightmares. She was stuck on a runaway wagon rolling on steel rails down a narrow granite tunnel into the bowels of the earth, past the bonepits and the dead cities, into the growing heat, missing turning after turning, the wagon getting faster and harder to control as gravity tightened its grip.

Her finger hovered over the screen. Did Lucy have a partner? Did she have children? The questions felt dangerous. Thunder in the hills. The crunch and crackle of something shifting its weight in the undergrowth.

Stop.

She switched the phone off and laid it very gently face down on the blanket as if it were the skeleton of a tiny bird. She closed her eyes and took a long, slow breath. May I be safe and free from suffering… She dropped a pebble down a deep, imaginary well, then waited for the faint splash and that flash of sunlight on the spreading ripples. May I be as happy and healthy as it is possible for me to be… She dropped another stone down the well. May I have ease of being… She dropped a third stone.

She waited, then opened her eyes. The stars were finally out. The Great Bear, Berenice’s Hair, the Lion, Hydra… That was pretty much her limit. She remembered walking onto the balcony of that hotel in Wanaka, the shock of looking up to find that someone had rearranged the constellations.

Scale. It was the one thing that had never lost its ability to unnerve and amaze her. The worlds we contained and the worlds that contained us. The Sloan Great Wall, the Eridanus Supervoid. Three million galaxies hidden behind your outstretched thumb. And sixty million cells inside that same thumb, every one a frenzy of looms and trolleys and pumps. A million miles of DNA.

The temperature was falling and she could feel the air growing rapidly damper. She had begun to shiver. She bundled the tobacco, the papers and the lighter in the blanket. She drained the tumbler and slipped it into a jacket pocket, the bottle into the other. There was a portable convector heater at the back of the cupboard in her room. She could put that on and stand over it for ten minutes. She got to her feet. Nikki and Sam would be in bed in that little cottage in St Brides by now. In the morning, with luck, they would throw back the curtains on that stupendous view and the blue sky the Met Office had promised.

This too was an actual world. You had to tell yourself that every day. With a breathable atmosphere and butterflies and thunderheads and yew trees so old that Roman soldiers had rested in their shade.

She would get up at eight and head down to the hotel for breakfast with Joe. She would order scrambled eggs on toast and a strong black coffee. They would talk about Tracey, they would talk about the baby, her first granddaughter.