months old lay in a safety cradle. She started the car again and the baby stopped crying, and after yanking the handbrake on she walked around to Evelyn. The dog barked once and stepped up to the woman and stood looking at her. She scruffled him behind the ears. ‘Is this your dog?’
‘No,’ Evelyn said.
The woman leaned down to examine his collar. ‘Where did you find him?’
‘He’s my dad’s.’ She pointed down the road in the direction the woman came from. ‘I don’t know his name.’
‘Blackie?’ The woman was speaking to the dog. ‘Blackie?’
The dog barked again, loud over the running car engine.
‘It’s acting like it can talk,’ Evelyn said. ‘Like you’re having a conversation.’
The woman laughed.
‘Is he yours?’ Evelyn asked. ‘Blackie?’
‘Yes. He’s grown a bit.’
Exhaust fumes coloured the air. The light of early morning had found its way onto everything now, on the dog’s conker-coloured eyes and the woman’s sleep-deprived face, in the spaces beneath the tree trunks and over the pile of grey stones Evelyn had gathered.
Evelyn dug at the stones with her foot, sending one skittering over to the woman. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘My dad’s really going to miss him.’
The woman frowned. ‘Can you help me bring him home? I don’t want him disturbing the baby.’
Blackie sat panting in the passenger seat and Evelyn sat in the back behind him, next to the sleeping infant, one hand reached forwards to hold the dog by the soft leather collar. The woman drove slowly, with the windows halfway down, back past the turn-off to Eve’s father’s house and on.
‘Do you have deer?’ Evelyn asked.
‘Yes,’ the woman said.
The baby woke and squalled. Blackie began to lunge around and Evelyn pulled him back into place. ‘What should I do?’
‘It’s all right. We’re nearly there.’
The car grated to a halt on the gravel drive outside a one-storey, red-brick farmhouse. The front door was white, with concrete pillars either side. ‘Can you wait in the car with Blackie?’ the woman said. ‘I want to surprise the kids.’
She unpicked the baby from the car seat and it stopped crying as she held it to her, its round little head nodding hungrily into the mother’s clavicle. The dog and Evelyn waited in the car. Blackie huffed. Evelyn hugged her knees up to her chest and pulled her ex’s leather jacket tighter around her. In the last few minutes the temperature seemed to have dropped; the lawns were dusted in patches with frost; her breath puffed, visible, into the air. Sometimes Daniel called in at the florist’s, and Kimiko teased her after he’d gone. The woman came out the front door, still holding the baby, and a man in a thick tartan flannel shirt, jeans and boots steered two children wearing pyjamas towards the car, his hands resting lightly on their shoulders, their little hands covering their eyes. The girl’s pyjamas were blue with a pink-pig pattern and the boy’s were covered with pictures of yellow trucks.
The woman crunched over the gravel back towards her car and Eve. Her children had clamoured over Blackie and hugged their parents tightly before chasing him inside. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Now would you like to see the deer?’
Dorothy woke around dawn short of breath, and Daniel wasn’t there. It was the carpet dust. The insides of her ears were hot and itchy. Between her shoulder blades was a raspy blockedness, weak and immovable at the same time. Leaning out over the edge of the bed, hair falling around her face, Dot scrabbled in the bottom of her bag, grit collecting under her fingernails, retrieved the inhaler and took a puff. Then there was a kind of glottal stop and she couldn’t breathe any more. She coughed but no air came out, there was just a retching sound. Something was blocking her windpipe. Launching around the dimly lit room naked she banged herself on the back as hard as she could, her body getting tighter and tighter with the lack of air. In the darkness came a sensation of the edges closing in. Another convulsion shook her and the thing in her throat entered her mouth wetly and she gasped, eyes streaming water, and the tiny scrap of fabric could be picked off her tongue and flicked aside.
She pulled Dan’s sweatshirt on and found some knickers in the ruched sheet at the bottom of the bed. The bedroom door was stiff. She yanked it open, her arm shaking, and pitched down the hallway towards the kitchen. The door of his