Long before the oil ran out, Heidi built the shelter. A dugout beneath the willow tree. Crushed earth, plywood, corrugated iron. Eggboxes pressed the ceiling low enough to keep their voices down. Heidi said it was safer that way.

Day or night, three toots on Little Stevie’s descant recorder—the cue for evacuation. Palms to frost-cold metal rungs, an orderly descent underground. In the long ache of hours with nowhere to go, Sue listens to Heidi breathe in the dark.

What if she dared to break that spell—reached for Heidi like she used to? There’s an itch to it now, a restless remembering she can’t quite soothe.

Before Little Stevie, there were wild camping nights—rain in the Trossachs, too much Hooch. Sue’s hands mapped what would become familiar ground—the slope of a hip, the sweep of a thigh, freckles scattered like stubborn stars. She’d believed there would be time to name them all.

What happened to us?

Sue asked it once, aloud. But Heidi watches the monitors instead. Snow or ash—impossible to tell. The garden whitening into absence. Everything covered without judgement: rubbish bags, the broken fence, three rusting cars propped up on bricks.

A project, Heidi had said. For when Little Stevie comes home.

But Stevie never did.

All that remained was a crumpled postcard from Varanasi, post-marked July 2009. It had arrived before the quiet set in. Cross-legged, a sadhu in saffron robes, birds circling as if to take him.

I’m happy now. Please don’t try to find me.

Sue remembers how the air seemed to tilt. How they tried to make sense of it—a small town, the weight of being different when the world still notices. The quiet ways a child learns to step away.

After that came noise—the wailing, blame. A bladed grief with nowhere to rest. But beneath it, something simpler held: love had not been enough to keep him. Sue thinks of Heidi before that knowing—hair wild, laughing into the storm, pointing at a single bright star.

That one, she’d said. It will guide us home, wherever we go.

Now they practise endings instead. Timed drills. Ration counts. Silence.

Sometimes when the cold contracts the pipes, Sue hears it—a thin, high note, a breath through plastic. She sits up, listening for a footstep on the ladder, hands on the hatch, anything to prove there’s still a way back. Still time.