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next door and passed the girl to Gabby. Charlie tucked her face into her mother’s shoulder.
    ‘Ta,’ said Gabby. As she turned away from Anna, a car passed by, lighting up the pale trunk of the solitary gum tree on the verge. It was such a dismal, lonely sound, a car driving away into the night. Anna watched the woman and child as they disappeared inside and the door closed behind them.
    •
    She woke at three – insomnia hour – and lay motionless for a moment, listening hard in case it was a sound from next door that woke her. But there was only the drone of traffic from the M1. The air felt thick and soupy. Most people died around 3 am and she understood why; the day was at its lowest ebb.
    Her mother had died at 3.30 but Anna didn’t find out until dawn, when her dad woke her by sitting on the side of her bed. Anna noticed that he smelled of mint toothpaste and that he had his clothes on.
    ‘Mum’s gone,’ he said.
    She half sat up. ‘Gone where?’
    ‘Dead. She’s dead.’
    And Anna’s head had ballooned until it seemed to fill the room, blood pulsing in her ears.
    She’s dead.
    From that moment on, for years, everything around her was slightly off-kilter: the shape of the front door, the smell of her bedroom. Even the way the water shot out of the kitchen tap was wrong. And she couldn’t stop thinking about the fact that Luke had ten years with their mother while Anna had only eight. She would never ever get those two extra years.

Chapter Four
    A nna leant on an elbow, doodling. She was supposed to come up with a new logo for an IT company, and she’d covered the page with circles, all versions of her laptop’s ‘on’ button.
    She was alone in the office; Russell and Monica were in the meeting room with a new client and Clay had the flu. She kept doodling and came up with a clichéd version of the company’s initials. She clicked through to their website to look for inspiration, then, before it finished loading, she typed in a Google search:
child bitten
. She tried another search, and another, until her huge screen offered up a photo of a child’s face: a dark, bruised bite mark on a plump cheek, the eyes obscured with a black box. The child’s skin was grey, and with a cold wash of horror, it occurred to Anna that it might be an autopsy photo. She closed the tab and walked away from the computer, her chest tight.
    At the window, she let her eyes rest on the red brick building across the lane, reassuringly mundane and solid. The horror in the photo was implied, those moments when the bite happened. She imagined small legs thrashing about, small hands. If the child in that photo was dead, how did he or she die? Not from the bite.
    A delivery van beeped backwards up the lane and a gust of laughter came from the meeting room. Russell and Monica emerged, folders in their arms, flashing big, energised smiles for the client. Anna returned to her desk, to the sloppy pencil doodles.
    ‘Coffee, Anna?’ called Monica from the doorway.
    ‘No, thanks, Mon.’ She glanced at her screen, and it was as if the image of the child was still there, burnt into the gel.
    •
    That morning she’d been watering her back garden when a dark-haired man called over the fence. ‘Hi there.’
    It was the scrawny guy from the night they moved in. He had a high-cheekboned, handsome face, but tight, as if the muscles had been immobilised. He rested his hands on the fence and spoke quietly, like he was taking up a conversation that had been interrupted. ‘So, how are you going?’
    ‘I’m well, thank you.’ She imagined saying back in the same conversational tone:
So, do you bite your daughter?
    ‘That old bathtub . . .’ he said and lifted his chin towards the back fence and the rusted yellow tub where Anna had planted waterlilies. He smelt of aftershave and had that shiny-skinned look of someone just shaved.
    ‘Yeah?’
    ‘Can I have it?’ He looked ready to climb over the fence and pick it up.
    ‘It belongs to