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instead, watching her mother across the rim of her cup. She seemed to be slumping lower, sinking into the hard wooden chair. She hadn’t said anything, not a word since the television had flashed to life, changing their world.
    “Mum? Why don’t you go on up to bed?” Freya leaned across the table, fingers stroking the soft skin on her mother’s arm. “Just for a little while. We’ll wake you when…we’ll wake you when we have some news.”
    It seemed like her mother didn’t hear her at first, that her words couldn’t penetrate this hell into which she had descended. Then, eventually, she looked up. Freya started. She had aged fifteen years. There were lines that Freya had never seen before, her gaze was dead, skin as white as the snow that lay thick on ground beyond the windows. Her mother’s lips moved, a child testing her first words. Then she seemed to give up, words more than she could possibly handle. Her gaze dropped and she shook her head.
    “You know, you can’t be sure he was on that flight.” Freya’s grandmother offered. “I mean, they change the crews around all the time. You know what these airlines are like. He’s off one minute, he’s working the next. Always getting called away. He’ll have been on a different flight. I’m sure of it.” Looking down, studying the red chequered cloth. “I’m sure of it.” This last a whisper.
    Freya looked down, studying her fingernails, chipped, saffron paint colouring the edges, and tried her best not to think about yesterday, about her father standing in the snow, the tension that pulsed across his shoulders. The look when he saw her, desperation edging into fear.
    “I’m telling you,” Freya’s grandmother had twisted the tea towel into a tight spiral “he’ll be fine.”
    “I’ll try the airline again.” Her grandfather’s chair scraped against the floor, nails down a chalk board. “Someone must know.”
    They watched him leave, closing the door softly behind him.
    “It’s awful.” Her grandmother was watching the television, shaking her head. “Just awful. Those poor people.” As if she hadn’t realised that ‘those poor people’ were them, as if it was just one more news cycle of murder and flooding and genocide. Tragic but not really real.
    Richard moved his hands, so that they covered his ears. His hair had flopped forward over his eyes. The lights of the television danced on the loose curls, and his fingers dug in, tugging, again and again.
    And in what seemed like seconds, the kitchen door was opening again, slowly this time, and Freya’s grandfather was there. Only he wasn’t looking at any of them and his steady fingers were trembling. Freya knew it without him saying it, could see it in his eyes, in the downturn of his lips. She reached out, taking tight hold of her baby brother’s hand.
    “Grampa?” Richard was looking at him, and it was like he was pleading. Say it isn’t so.
    Then her grandfather reached out, took hold of her mother’s shoulder. And she was looking up at him, eyes pleading, large tears leaking from the corners of her eyes.
    Freya’s grandfather shook his head. “I’m so sorry.” His voice cracked. “I’m so, so sorry.”
    It seemed that time stopped in the kitchen. That they hung there, the world no longer spinning.
    Then a sound, her mother, a low moan creeping from her, the sound of an animal caught in a trap. Her grandmother gasping, the news punching her in her narrow stomach. Her grandfather had moved, had wrapped his arms around her mother’s shoulders as she shook. Richard, rearing back pushing the chair away so that it tumbled, hitting the tiled floor with a clatter, shoving his way past his grandfather and was gone. And Freya frozen. Because this isn’t real. None of this can possibly be real.

Chapter 9
    Cecilia – Friday, 16th March – 9.22am
    Cecilia was alone when she awoke. Unimaginable that she could have slept, and it seemed to her now that what she had experienced