Her body shook with whatever she was trying to keep inside. She didn’t want to see her. Not just for herself but for the girl as well. It seemed a betrayal. Nora was her mother, but also, in another, more important way: she was not her mother. She was just a strange woman in a strange house looking at a strange child.

‘Mummy? Can you hear me? I had a nightmare.’

She heard the man move in his bed somewhere in the room behind her. This would only become more awkward if he woke up, properly. So, Nora decided to speak to the child.

‘Oh, oh that’s a shame,’ she whispered. ‘It’s not real, though. It was just a dream.’

‘It was about bears.’

Nora closed the door behind her. ‘Bears?’

‘Because of that story.’

‘Right. Yes. The story. Come on, get back in your bed . . .’ This sounded harsh, she realised. ‘Sweetheart,’ she added, wondering what she – her daughter in this universe – was called. ‘There are no bears here.’

‘Only teddy bears.’

‘Yes, only—’

The girl became a little more awake. Her eyes brightened. She saw her mother, so for a second Nora felt like that. Like her mother. She felt the strangeness of being connected to the world through someone else. ‘Mummy, what were you doing?’

She was speaking loudly. She was deeply serious in the way that only four-year-olds (she couldn’t have been much older) could be.

‘Ssh,’ Nora said. She really needed to know the girl’s name. Names had power. If you didn’t know your own daughter’s name, you had no control whatsoever. ‘Listen,’ Nora whispered, ‘I’m just going to go downstairs and do something. You go back to bed.’

‘But the bears.’

‘There aren’t any bears.’

‘There are in my dreams.’

Nora remembered the polar bear speeding towards her in the fog. Remembered that fear. That desire, in that sudden moment, to live. ‘There won’t be this time. I promise.’

‘Mummy, why are you speaking like that?’

‘Like what?’

‘Like that.’

‘Whispering?’

‘No.’

Nora had no idea what the girl thought she was speaking like. What the gap was, between her now and her, the mother. Did motherhood affect the way you spoke?

‘Like you are scared,’ the girl clarified.

‘I’m not scared.’

‘I want someone to hold my hand.’

‘What?’

‘I want someone to hold my hand.’

‘Right.’

‘Silly Mummy!’

‘Yes. Yes, I’m silly.’

‘I’m really scared.’

She said this quietly, matter-of-fact. And it was then that Nora looked at her. Really, properly looked at her. The girl seemed wholly alien and wholly familiar all at once. Nora felt a swell of something inside her, something powerful and worrying.

The girl was staring at her in a way no one had stared at her before. It was scary, the emotion. She had Nora’s mouth. And that slightly lost look that people had sometimes attributed to her. She was beautiful and she was hers – or kind of hers – and she felt a swell of irrational love, a surge of it, and knew – if the library wasn’t coming for her right now (and it wasn’t) – that she had to get away.

‘Mummy, will you hold my hand . . .?’

‘I . . .’

The girl put her hand in Nora’s. It felt so small and warm and it made her feel sad, the way it relaxed into her, as natural as a pearl in a shell. She pulled Nora towards the adjacent room – the girl’s bedroom. Nora closed the door nearly-shut behind her and tried to check the time on her watch, but in this life it was a classic-looking analogue watch with no light display so it took a second or two for her eyes to adjust. She double-checked the time on her phone as well. It was 2:32 a.m. So, depending when she had gone to bed in this life, this version of her body hadn’t had much sleep. It certainly felt like it hadn’t.

‘What happens when you die, Mummy?’

It wasn’t totally dark in the room. There was a sliver of light coming in from the hallway and there was a nearby streetlamp that meant a thin glow filtered through the dog-patterned curtains. She could see the squat rectangle that was Nora’s bed. She could see the silhouette of a cuddly toy elephant on the floor. There were other toys too. It was a happily cluttered room.

Her eyes shone at Nora.

‘I don’t know,’ Nora said. ‘I don’t think anyone knows for sure.’

She frowned. This didn’t satisfy her. This didn’t satisfy her one bit.

‘Listen,’ Nora said. ‘There is a chance that just before you die, you’ll get a chance to live again. You can have things you didn’t have before. You can choose the life you want.’

‘That sounds good.’

‘But you don’t have to have this worry for a very long time. You are going to have a life full of exciting adventures. There will be so many happy things.’

‘Like camping!’

A burst of warmth radiated through Nora as she smiled at this sweet girl. ‘Yes. Like camping!’

‘I love it when we go camping!’