She pauses to catch her breath, bent in half, hands on knees. Across the valley, two private ambulances pull out of Hilltop House. She watches their slow progress through the village but they are too far away to be anything more than grey smudges on the skyline.

The water sheets off her shoulders, trickles down her neck. Her hair hangs in clumps around her face. She is a handful of footsteps from the tree when the sky lights up again.

The girl lifts her head and watches the shape of lightning against violet clouds. She waits for it to happen again. She is still waiting when a crack opens up above her and a bright bolt strikes the right upper quadrant of her back.

The lightning moves at one-third the speed of light. It haloes her. It scorches the silver necklace at her throat, flashes across her torso, the current scrambling the electrical impulses of her heart. It exits through the soles of her feet, leaving two coin-shaped holes and singe marks on her trainers.

The girl is thrown to the grass, her body smoking, the grumble of thunder in the air.

PART ONE

WHO?

1

Thursday, 13 December 2018

In eleven minutes and fourteen seconds, Catherine Allen, who only wants to be ordinary, will be dead.

She doesn’t know it yet. Her face is pressed into the clean sheet she smoothed across their bed that morning, darkness wrapped around her like an old friend. Mouth slightly open. Deep and even breaths.

The snow began to fall at midnight and hasn’t stopped. Four hours later, it covers the square of their front garden, the roof of their boxy cottage and the street outside. A thickness that suffocates the sounds of the night until it is too late to run.

Even then, she can’t be sure what disturbs her. A minute ago, she was asleep, a reprieve from the turmoil of the last few days. Now here she is, jerked into wakefulness like a fish on a hook, eyes wide in the still of their bedroom, the thunder of adrenalin in her veins.

Honor?

She listens to the blackness, for the cries of her twelve-year-old daughter. Honor’s night terrors, a recent affliction, have been known to wake up the rest of the family, but tonight she is quiet.

The tip of Catherine’s nose is cold. The heating went off hours ago and the air tastes of ice. She pulls the duvet over her head. Immediate warmth. The sound of her heartbeat in her ears.

Intruders?

She strains to hear beneath the quickening of her own breath. Some nights, she is convinced of footsteps tracking across the kitchen floor or the whisper of voices in the hallway, but there is never anyone there.

Edward rolls over, dragging the duvet with him. His snoring fills up all the silent spaces, and she nudges him with her foot. He stops snoring and starts grinding his teeth.