Shauna had never liked the way the light died at the end of the day in late August. The vibrant sunsets of late June and July were gone, and this final week of true summer slipped away in sudden shadows and the night descended too early.

And the flies were buzzing in the next room.

She stood over Jess while the baby slept and she listened to the flies beyond the bedroom. The hiss and hum of hundreds of insects she knew weren’t in there; the sound only pretending to be whispers a fraction out of reach of her hearing. But still, there was a rhythm to the hum, a cadence that was precise.

It’s speaking. It’s a voice.

Shauna held the frame of the cot as if it was about to shatter and spill Jess to the carpet. Or maybe she was going to break into a million pieces and scatter through the room, down the stairs and fill the house.

Jess grunted and flexed her tiny fingers before making fists. She’d been asleep for an hour. Waking her was a terrible idea. Tim would believe she’d woken by herself, but Shauna would know what she’d done, as she knew the buzzing of the flies was noticeably more distinct whenever she was near her child.

But still not clear enough. Whispers and hissing in the drone that made her eyes water and brought her hands to her ears as if to flap the flies away. A voice.

She strode to the hallway and into the spare room. There were still a few boxes left unpacked from their move six months ago: unworn clothes and a collection of Tim’s Blu-rays he said he couldn’t bear to lose. The old cabinet she’d carted between homes since university close to fifteen years ago; the odds and sods they either needed to throw out or find a proper home for, and everything they called the Baby Stuff. Always a pronoun term, the bundles of nappies, clothes, towels, and bedding all clean and ready for the next day and week and month while Jess grew and breathed and was a piece of heaven in their home.

No flies.

She said it aloud. “No flies. No voices. Happy now?”

Despite the dying day, enough light shone through the window to expose every corner and inch of the room. Like the rest of the house, it was clean. Tim kept on top of that when she was too tired to care.

She could still hear the whispers. They’d moved the instant she’d entered the room, sneaking past her to skim over their plush carpet and lurk in the hallway. A steady hum at the edges of her hearing. She could reach for them and they’d slip away, mocking her, gleeful in their mischief and malice.

Shauna knew she needed to tell her husband she was hearing things she knew weren’t real. Unless she spoke to a handful of close friends or one or two colleagues, there was nobody else to talk to. She’d checked online for any symptoms connecting new motherhood with auditory hallucinations, found nothing and lain awake for hours while Tim was a silent rock at her back. Awake and listening to the buzzing of flies.

She returned to their bedroom and Jess. The whispers were louder but no more distinct. And definitely less like the buzzing of insects investigating rotting meat. In the last few minutes, they’d become more insistent. Because they wanted her to hear them while the day died.

Shauna cradled the waking baby. The flies buzzed in her ear, and it was all too easy to picture a stream of fat insects, segmented bodies plump with late summer feeding, circling the side of her head and using her ear canal as some kind of runway.

Bluebottle One, you are cleared for approach at Left Ear. Bank right and come in for a direct landing. Her brain is ready for you.

Jess grunted, eyes opening, mouth trembling. Shauna hushed her, patted her back. It didn’t help. Jess woke, blinking slowly, frowning.

“Shit.”

Pretending all she heard was the weak protest of a baby disturbed from her rest, Shauna left the bedroom. Tim was at the foot of the stairs.

“Everything okay?” he asked.

“She woke up,” Shauna whispered.

If he’d been watching their monitor in the living room and not his phone, he’d have seen her pick up Jess before she woke. Shauna descended, Jess now fully awake and crying.

“I think she needs changing.” Shauna patted Jess’s bottom. Bone dry.

“Want me to do it?”

She’d guessed right. He’d been on his phone while she’d been upstairs. That was fair. She’d have done the same if their positions were reversed.

“It’s okay.”

In the living room, Shauna made a show of checking Jess’s nappy even though she knew it was clean while Tim loaded the dishwasher and made her a peppermint tea.

“I’ll get up with her in the night. If she wakes up,” he called. “Only if, of course.”

It was a little joke and they both knew it. Jess slept for a few hours at a time but would be guaranteed to wake at least once or twice.

“Maybe we should give her a shot of whisky before bed,” Shauna replied, operating on autopilot.

“I thought she was more of a double vodka and tonic kind of girl.”

“Just keep her off the real ale.”

“Nothing wrong with that. It’ll give me and her something to talk about when she’s older.”

“Saddo.”

Still on autopilot; still pretending normality was by her side with the silly conversation with Tim. Still convinced the constant whisper of the flies upstairs had been a voice.

This is stupid. This is insane. You’re just tired and bored and stressed because of that. Get outside tomorrow. Get moving. Get some air.

The whispers returned. Right at her ear.

Jess’s mumbling burst into screams.

###

3:07.

Shauna watched the display on the monitor until the blue light softened to grey. Tim hadn’t stirred at the sudden illumination. His breathing, slow and regular, told her he slept easily. At three in the morning with the world quiet, she realised it was easy to hate her husband just a little for his easy rest.

There was something in her house. No flies. No breakdown in her mind or her gut. Something sneaking through the rooms while her back was turned; something at the corners of her eyes.

A whispering something fixated on her child. So, she would stay awake and keep watch.

What’s all the noise?

Tim’s shout from the kitchen while Jess’s wails were born from fear and it had taken all of her effort not to lash out at him with her own fear. Holding Jess, kissing her head, Shauna told Tim a bat had struck the window, startling the baby. It was the first lie that came to her mouth. They’d seen bats once or twice in the evening over the last month, the creatures flitting through the dusk like speeding bullets between trees.

He held them, somehow getting Jess to quieten in moments. And if she was being honest in these empty hours before dawn, she hated him for that ease, as well.

She’d closed all the windows in the house, watching for the slightest movement on the grass of their gardens and beyond to the road. Barely four hours later, she was awake. She was on guard.

Against what?

She had no idea.

Tim mumbled sleep-talk and she slid closer to him, eager for his bulk and warmth despite the pleasant temperature in their bedroom. He grunted against her neck and she reached low to place a hand on him. He stirred, but she knew it was more of an instinctive reaction than anything more. She withdrew her hand when he muttered again.

Shauna shifted a fraction to check the cot. Jess might wake at any moment; there was no getting away from that. Shauna would take it, though. It was no secret that while her pregnancy had been straightforward, it had also been a surprise. The miscarriage in her twenties; the focus on work in her early to mid-thirties and Tim developing his business over the last decade had taken over any concrete plans to try again. But then, it happened as if it was as easy as breathing. A straightforward pregnancy; a healthy child later than she might have planned if plans made any difference in life, and now this private time in the dark and the quiet.

She would hold this moment when the worries and the doubts thrived in the dirt, when they pushed through the earth like black roses.

Shauna dozed, conscious enough to know she was listening for Jess, caught in the thinnest layer of rest and pushed back to full waking when her bladder protested.

She lay flat for another moment, not wanting to disturb Tim. He’d curled over while she dozed and slept deeply. The monitor now read 3:55. Dawn light would caress the curtains soon. She’d be fully awake long before then, probably feeding Jess in the spare room and listening for the slightest suggestion of buzzing flies.

She stepped lightly to the cot. Jess slept with the same ease as her father. Shauna watched Jess for a few moments until her bladder demanded release. In the bathroom, she winced at the harsh light and the gleam of the tiles and didn’t flush in case the sound carried to Jess. Crossing the unlit hallway, she stopped several paces from the bedroom door.

Moonlight dropped silver through a small window at the top of the stairs and whitened the first couple of steps and carpet. The air pushing up from below was cold. While the days were not the height of July, the afternoons of late August were warm enough to leave some residue well into the evenings. This air was night air. Outside air.

Her bare feet making no sound on the carpet, uncomfortably aware she wore only her underwear and a loose t-shirt, Shauna crossed to the top of the stairs.

Below, a breeze wafted and brought the scents of the low bushes in their front garden along with a weak suggestion of damp or maybe rain from a few miles away. A summer shower to clear the pavements and beer gardens and send everyone running into the pub.

She raced after him, shrieking and laughing, her hair clinging to her forehead in strands, her short dress sticking to her legs even though it was only a quick run into the pub from the bench, then realising she’d left her cigarettes on the table.

His gallantry over the top, deliberately theatrical as if he were a knight coming to the fair maiden’s rescue, he’d run to the table, grabbed her fags, and offered them to her with a flourish. She laughed and kissed him hard, tasting his drink and tasting him.

Max.

Shauna stared at the wall-like shadows below.

The air was from outside. The front door was open.

Creeping over the carpet, stair to stair and propelled by the exterior breeze, the voice reached her.

“Shauna.”

It was low, considering. And male.

The passing seconds sank into quicksand. She stood in the unlit hallway for a single year or a thousand and had no idea how much time was passing while she couldn’t breathe or blink and the man spoke from the darkness.

“Shauna.”

A man in her home, the door open and Jess sleeping.

Shauna whirled, convinced now her back was to the foot of the stairs that someone would swoop out of the darkness and pull her down into its mouth. She found the light. Illumination blazed. She couldn’t yell for Tim as she had in the bedroom. No oxygen in her lungs. No oxygen in the world even as the night air invaded her house.

She teetered on the top stair, the ground floor hall marginally brightened. There was nobody down there.

“Shauna.”

She knew the voice.

Shauna went down the stairs two at a time, hit the wall and bounced off it. The chill clung to her marble-like legs, caressing her skin. She thumped more lights. The front door was ajar. The night peeked around the opening.

Wafting in on the breeze, tired and fading as if it came to her across the miles of barren fields and an empty city, she heard the man say her name a final time.

“Shauna.”

She ran for the door. Before she reached it, it closed by itself.

###

“I’m fine, Tim. We’re fine. Everything’s fine.”

“Yeah, but are you fine?”

Shauna managed a laugh but kept it gentle so she didn’t disturb Jess while the baby fed.

“I can be home by four,” Tim said, and she was about to tell him that wasn’t necessary before closing her mouth. He was going in late and coming home early, had been doing so for the last week since whatever the hell happened in the middle of the night and the call out to the police.

On her tablet screen, Tim glanced out of his office window, then returned to her and Jess. “Early dinner at the pub?” he asked.

“That would be nice.” Shauna shifted slightly to ease the pressure on her arm. Jess fed. It was asking a lot for him to work reduced hours, but then, he’d built the company and employed good people. They could keep things in order without him being there full-time for a few days.

“I’ll buy you half a shandy and a bacon buttie,” he said.

“With brown sauce?”

“Of course. Who’d have it any other way?”

“And mayonnaise?”

He made gagging noises. She’d had a craving for mayonnaise in the first few months of her pregnancy after being indifferent to the stuff for her entire life. The craving all but vanished overnight five months in. Tim said he’d divorce her if she continued to eat it after she gave birth.

“As it’s you, then okay.” He paused. She knew what he was going to ask. “Doors okay?”

“The doors are fine.” It was a short reply, but it was all she’d had. He’d changed every single lock the afternoon after the police maintained the door must not have been locked securely and done their best to assure her they’d check the nearby streets for anyone wandering around at four in the morning. The downstairs windows were now locked, and he was having a word with a mate who fit alarms. Their home was secure.

Their home was a fucking prison. If the whispering out of earshot began again, she’d be trapped with it.

“Ali says he’ll be out this weekend to see about alarms. He reckons it’s an easy job.”

“We don’t need them, Tim.”

It was a lie straight from her denial to her mouth. They did. She needed to know if anyone said her name from the darkness, then they couldn’t get out of the house without alerting a security company.

Anyone? You know who it was.

She’d known the instant the memory from twenty years ago broke its way into her waking mind. The running from the summer downpour; the laughing and the buzz from a couple of glasses of white wine, then the hot feel of Max’s hand on her backside as he slid her damp dress over her skin while she laughed more and didn’t give a shit about anyone else in the pub.

“It’s a piece of cake.” Tim was still on about the fucking alarms while she thought she was probably going insane. And that wasn’t fair in the least. He was a good man. She loved him with everything she had. And the early days when that love was stained with guilt and shame were buried in the earth. She knew he picked at the memory sometimes, knew it without him saying a word. A wife knew her husband, she thought. Knew him in ways only men could be known. That was what made him her husband. And if he still felt old guilt over their early days and the beginning of their relationship, that was simply because he was Tim.

Jess gurgled. Milk ran down her chin. Shauna wiped her chin and switched breasts. On the screen of her iPad, Tim shifted position so his head and chest blocked anyone who might enter his office without knocking from seeing her.

“I better go,” he said. “Sure everything’s okay?”

“It’s all good.” She thought about lying. She could tell him some of the women from work were popping round in a bit, then dismissed it. She had Jess in her arms. No siblings, no friends free in the middle of a workday; her mother two hundred miles away on the Cornish coast.

She had Jess. That was all she needed.

Tim blew kisses and was gone. Jess continued to feed and Shauna did her best not to think about the hallway and the front door. Days later and in the welcome normality of early afternoon sunlight, believing the police had been right about the door was easy. Welcome, too. After all, it was possible that the door hadn’t been locked properly before they went to bed. The female officer had been sympathetic about having a baby in the house. Her son was five now, but oh yes, she remembered the early days very well. The lack of sleep and focus. The stress. The tiredness.

Warm eyes; empathy; a human connection of mother to mother while the other officer said they’d take a look around the nearby streets and in a park a few minutes’ walk away. All that and Tim trying to get Jess back to sleep in the noise and light of her disturbed sleep.

It was possible. She knew that.

“I heard him, Jess.”

Not only that, she’d felt the warmth and moisture of her dress sticking to her legs along with the heat of that June afternoon. Felt it like she felt her child feeding. A memory she hadn’t touched in long years bringing a wealth of sensory input from the heat and rain to the pleasant warmth in her lower stomach and lower still when Max cradled her backside and his grin when he realised she wore no underwear below her dress. The hum of voices and laughter; the sweet tang of the wine on her teeth and tongue; the faint crawl of disquiet around the back of her neck when the interior voice, always soft but insistent, asked her if she was drinking fast because she didn’t want to think about things with Max. Or that guy she’d spoken to for a few minutes at Rachel’s party a month before.

Tim.

Memories. Dead memories. She wanted to laugh at the weak joke she’d made without thinking. Definitely dead memories. They had no place in her life now and there wasn’t any of the confused, hurting kid she’d been in her early twenties here in her comfortable home with her fine man and her heaven in her arms while Max could never now be anything more than part of those dead memories.

Sod the nightmare of a voice in the night or the front door not being locked. And sod the buzzing flies lurking at the edges of her hearing. She had the world in her hands right here and now.

Jess pulled away from Shauna’s breast. Shauna shifted her to wind her and saw the child’s face. Her mouth open, dribbling milk, the tiny lips curled at the edges and her eyes staring.

Jess glared at Shauna.

It was physically impossible for a six-month-old to glare with an adult’s rage and loathing. And impossible or not, it made no difference. Shauna held her child, staring down at her with a cry trapped at the back of her throat, while Jess’s hate was a wave, a beam, a particle of black light.

Shauna swallowed the cry and whispered to her daughter. “Jess?”

Jess’s eyes rolled over and she vomited Shauna’s milk in a hot stream.

###

She was moving through oil, and it was a viscous liquid at the side of normal things. Removed one step from reality, Shauna paid the taxi driver and walked to the front of the house. The sound of the departing vehicle made her want to run to the road and shout for him to come back. None of the neighbours were in sight; at almost noon on a Tuesday, they’d be at work. Their little road was middle-class suburbia through and through. Their neighbours were probably embarrassed by the ambulance and the screaming from four days ago.

Not looking back, Shauna unlocked the door, entered the stale air of the house and fumbled with her phone to send a message to Tim.

I’m home. Any news? I’ll be back within the hour. X

He hadn’t wanted her to leave the hospital despite insisting it would do her some good to get out of there, have a shower and change her clothes. The nurses said Jess was showing zero difference to any point since Friday afternoon; they were monitoring her constantly and as soon as there was any news, they’d tell Shauna and Tim.

And Tim still didn’t want her to leave, but getting out of there for an hour would stop her from losing her mind because in her mind was where she screamed at Max to leave her child alone. If she’d seen judgment on his face or in the nurses’ eyes for daring to leave her child even for a short time while the machines beeped and the doctors made their notes, then so be it. Shauna knew that was simply paranoid imagination brought on by her own guilt and the quacking voice inside that hectored and nagged her to stay beside Jess while the child breathed.

She knew it like she knew Max Pender could not possibly be any part of her life now.

Tim’s reply arrived as she went from room to room downstairs, listening for the slightest suggestion of the buzzing flies and any whisper or mutter of her name.

No news. She’s still sleeping. Nurse just told me there should be another scan tomorrow. I’ll stay here. You get some sleep. I’ll call if any news. X

“Get some sleep?” She said it to her phone as if Tim could hear her. His suggestion was ridiculous. She just needed . . .

Needed surety her mind was working its way loose. One more bolt unscrewed; one more joint snapped in half and all the moorings of normality straining with the damage. Because her child wasn’t simply ill; Jess had been robbed of everything good. Anyone but her parents would say she was too young to be developing any individuality or personality. Shauna knew better. The building blocks of the person Jess would become were already forming. Far below, maybe, but there all the same. A person ready for the future, ready for her life to begin every single day, and those days waiting to take her into that future of good days and long nights. All of that now stolen from Jess in the unexplained fever, the almost constant vomiting, the horrendous moment of her glaring up at her mother before Shauna’s milk turned into hot, stinking sick.

Shauna sobbed once, rested on the wall in the living room and heard the flies, again. Their eye-watering hum assaulted her ears like a blow. As always, it was in the next room. And the next and the next as she ran through the house. It was only when she tripped on the stairs that she realised she’d been screaming Max’s name. Fighting to control her breath, sure she was going to soil herself, Shauna gripped the low ledge near the window and focused on the heat of the sunlight. Today’s sunlight; the bright day of now. And now was thirty-five, married and a mother; happy with her family and her job. Now was not old days and the hours free from commitment because all she did was see her friends, laugh, and fuck Max to quieten the growing doubt her life was becoming a waste.

This was now.

“Max.”

The scream caught in her mouth. She welcomed the jagged pain.

Jess’s loathing; her unbridled hate for her mother like a punch in the face, breaking skin and bone while the sour reek of Shauna’s milk splattered across Jess’s mouth and Shauna’s face before creeping into the bricks of their home, festering there, rotting there like an old and ugly secret.

The flies were upstairs.

She ran with the speed and grace of her body at twenty-one; she tasted the wine and smelled the sunshine as she heard her friends’ laughter and pushed closer to Max on the bench in the pub garden.

Shauna reached the bedroom door, convinced it had been open when they left the house in the ambulance, the buzz of the flies an atonal, discordant hum beating in her ears, in her mouth, and vibrating through her centre as if a flurry of the insects was about to burst free.

The flies fell silent the instant Shauna shouldered the door open. On the bed, a naked woman straddled a man, her head thrown back and her hair plastered to her neck. He gripped her breasts and she rode him as he thrust. The scene was completely silent. The sex didn’t need sound and she didn’t need to see the woman’s face as Tim fucked her.

She was looking at herself. A younger Shauna with an easier body not marked by her twenties or thirties or pregnancy. Tim was younger, too. His hair was yet to go; the muscles of his chest and stomach were tight. He pushed deeper and the Shauna on top of him rose, sank, rose, leaning forward to feel his chest as he continued to hold her breasts. Daylight muted by a few clouds that hadn’t been in the sky seconds ago coated the other Shauna’s shoulders and upper back. Her neck was flushed, her head limp, mouth open and the speed of Tim’s movement increasing. He pulled her closer at the end. The watching Shauna sank to her knees, weeping. Her stomach was a pit of pain as if she’d been stabbed. A hurricane battered her emotions. A hurt that swallowed any physical agony, a pain blanketing her head so she couldn’t breathe, but it didn’t matter because she didn’t want to breathe. She wanted darkness and to live there without a single human emotion.

Knocked by a hurricane from the hurt into rage, Shauna managed to lift her head.

The other Shauna and the younger Tim were gone. The bed was the bed of now, not fifteen years ago and the first time she’d slept with Tim and done her best not to cry over the image of Max’s face even as she orgasmed.

Rage.

This was some elemental anger, nothing so prosaic as simple rage. This was righteous fury. She’d been betrayed, wronged.

He’d been betrayed. Wronged.

Her phone vibrated in her jeans pocket. The ring reached her, but slowly. The sound slipped though earth and stone and air before she managed to answer Tim’s call.

“Baby, listen. You need to get back here now. Right now. This is bad.” He was crying. His words were perfectly clear even with the tears and his panting. Behind his voice, others. The hospital staff, visitors and someone calling his name—Mr Wilkinson—with insistence.

“Jess is worse. She’s . . . ah, Jesus, Shor. They’ve got her breathing on those fucking machines. She’s fucking wired to them.”

“What?”

Saying anything else was impossible because Tim’s words were nonsense.

“Wires, Shor. Wires.”

He broke down, unmanned by all the hurt in the world. A clatter hit her ears. He’d dropped his phone. A second later, a woman spoke, her voice calm and in full control.

“Mrs Wilkinson?”

“I’m here,” she said.

“This is Dr Patel. I’m with your husband. Are you able to get back here quickly and safely?”

“I can.”

“Please do. We’re doing every single thing we can for Jess. You can believe that. I will do whatever it takes to help your daughter, but she is extremely ill. Do not drive here. Get a taxi. Do you understand?”

“I do.”

“I’ll stay with your husband, Mrs Wilkinson. We have the best people in with Jess now. She’s in trouble, but we will do everything in our power to bring her through it. All you need to do is stay calm and trust.”

“I know.”

Shauna hung up. She breathed and smelled human bodies. She smelled what she and Tim had done. The rage wanted to return. The anger of the betrayed.

“Max.”

The smell blew into a stink.

“Leave my daughter alone.”

Other than the shadow of her body on the carpet, the room was awash with sunlight. The few clouds that muted her younger body were gone because they were fifteen years old.

Max was in her house.

“Get the fuck out of my home, Max.”

This was her life, her child, and he would not be part of either.

Shauna knew what she had to do.

###

Tim phoned nine times and sent a dozen messages before Shauna turned her phone off. An hour later, she was parked on a suburban street in a town fifteen miles from their home, doing her best not to think of Jess in the hospital or Tim going out of his mind because he couldn’t get hold of her while their daughter was—

Shauna blocked the rest of the thought. This was her business. The next few minutes. She would make Jess better by doing . . .

This.

Tracking down Tracey Pender had been frighteningly easy. Facebook, several public photos taken in the vets where Tracey worked and searching for her by name and town online. Two hours of searching on her phone had brought her here—a hundred feet from Tracey’s house on a pleasant street in this nice town of old streets in its centre and new developments around its edges. She’d had a vague idea that Max had moved here at least twelve years ago, a fact probably mentioned by mutual friends with whom she’d since lost touch. His death had made the news. A pile up on the A14 in winter fog; dozens injured and one fatality. Three years since she’d seen his face on the news, then on various posts from people on Facebook. Three years since Tim asked if she was okay about it and she’d lied and said yes, it was very sad especially for his wife, she hoped the injured people pulled through and did he want a glass of wine?

Her ex-boyfriend, her first real boyfriend, was three years in the ground. Or maybe he’d been cremated. Maybe he was smoke in that March chill.

Maybe Jess breathed him in.

Trying not to gag, Shauna left her car. She kept both hands at her sides, the slight weight of the knife there in her back pocket, and walked towards number seventeen. A few cars were parked in drives, but not many. People would be home from their office jobs in the next couple of hours. Kids who still had a couple of weeks of summer holidays were probably in their rooms, on their phones and tablets. Plenty of ears to hear what was coming and there wasn’t a thing she could do about that. It didn’t matter. Not when put against Jess.

Clouds painted the blue sky with a grey gloom. They promised rain. Shauna looked up as she walked. Not a cloud in sight. This was late August of now with autumn around the corner and the days still warm, the light still rich and the leaves healthy on the trees. No summer shower today; no sapphire sky made mucky while the scent of rain was hot on the sunlight.

This is now and you are dead.

Max’s flies weren’t with her. He was, though. She smelled his aftershave as she felt his rage.

Shauna rang the doorbell at number seventeen, right hand still at her side.

This is now. This is now. This is now.

It was a mantra and a battle-cry and a prayer.

Tracey Pender opened the door. “Hello?”

“Hi. My name’s Shauna. I’m hoping you can help me.”

By some tiny miracle, there was no madness in her voice.

“Yes?” Tracey said, and while her tone was normal, her eyes were not. Nor was her scent. Shauna smelled something animal-like from the other woman. Tracey had no idea who stood at her door and no obvious reason to fear, but the scent was growing stronger all the same. Some distant part of Tracey’s mind had woken to warn her of life and death inches away.

Tracey made it a step backwards before Shauna moved.

Yanking the steak knife from her pocket and bringing it to the woman’s throat, Shauna went for her hard and fast.

Wrapped around one another, Tracey pulling away from the blade, they crashed to the hall floor and Shauna lost her hold on the knife. She saw it bounce on the carpet beside a squat cabinet.

Screaming, Tracey punched Shauna in the side of the head, the face, the shoulder. Each blow was thrown without aim or direction. Shauna felt the blows and the pain but in an abstract way. She rolled with Tracey, clamped to her as if they were one body while Tracey spat and shrieked for Shauna to get off. They hit the cabinet, knocked it, and papers and small ornaments fell to the floor.

“Get off me.” Tracey cried it in Shauna’s ear. It was like being blasted with a fire alarm. Shauna jerked away and struck her head on the wall with a solid blow. Her teeth snapped together. She tasted blood and landed a heavy blow on Tracey’s mouth. Lips mashed against teeth; skin split and bone grazed Shauna’s stinging knuckles. Still swearing, still shrieking, Tracey managed to lift a knee and aimed it at Shauna’s crotch. Shauna twisted at the last second; the blow hit her thigh and lightning flashed to her groin and down to her ankle. Spitting blood, she knocked Tracey’s head against the cabinet. It rocked on its legs. Aiming for Tracey’s mouth again. Shauna punched her in the throat and Tracey’s cry became a ragged choke as she fought to breathe.

“Max. You fucking hear me?” Shauna found the knife she’d dropped. Her hand refused to grab it and she realised the middle finger was twisted at the knuckle; the index finger was bent back too far. From faraway, she smelled rain—strong and fierce and cleansing the heat of the day. It had been then; the cleanse now was a memory. The rain of right here was a dirty flood because drains had burst and the choking pipes gushed mud and leaves and waste. Sunlight drowned in the rain and the cling of her dress to the backs of her bare legs and her bare arse was a suffocating second skin.

“Max, you bastard? You hear me?”

Screeching, Shauna yanked Tracey’s head up and brought the knife to her neck. Blood burst from Tracey’s open lips. It painted her chin like red jam. One eye was sealed shut. The other rolled, a white staring ball. This woman with her little house on a nice street in a town Shauna barely knew; a woman who cared for animals and kept her dead husband’s Facebook account live, who tagged him in pictures three years after his death and who wouldn’t care about Shauna’s life with him or Shauna’s old guilt of seeing Tim before she ended her relationship with Max.

Crying, unable to catch her breath, Shauna drew the blade over Tracey’s skin and watched a thin line of blood dribble to the woman’s t-shirt. Noise beyond the screaming tried to break through; she kicked it away. There was only here and the noise and stink of it.

“Max, you listen to me right now. You hear me? You stay the fuck away from my baby. You leave Jess right now or Tracey is dead. Do you get that? Get the fuck over me cheating on you, you fucking child. Move on. You’re dead so stay fucking dead and leave my baby alone.”

In the doorway to the living room, Max was a nebulous shape. Daylight shone through his body. Dust motes floated in his form and he stank of the shower that drenched the pub garden so long ago.

In silence, he screamed at her, mouth open like a pit, eyes on fire. He reached for her with hands turned into an animal’s claws, mouth breaking to split his head in two. A storm cloud of fat flies burst free, their buzzing drowning out Tracey’s shrieks and Shauna’s heart bellowing at the thing in the doorway.

You come for Jess again and I’ll cut her fucking throat. Do you hear me? I don’t care how long it takes or what happens. You come for Jess again and I’ll rip her heart out. That’s a promise, Max.

It was a stalemate.

Max’s fading form blew away as if a storm blasted through the house. The hundreds of flies bore down on Shauna’s face, streaming for her mouth in a jet-black flood.

Fucking stalemate, Max. You hurt Jess and I kill Tracey. That’s my promise.

The flies blackened her vision, burying sight in their flood. As they reached her, hands grabbed her from behind, yanked her clear off Tracey and knocked the knife from her broken fingers.

In the din of approaching police sirens and the yells from Tracey’s neighbours, Shauna was thrown to the floor. She sprawled flat, heard men bellowing at her to stay down and others shouting for the police to hurry.

The flies were gone.

She sobbed for her child even as she knew Max would leave Jess alone. In the days ahead and whatever they might bring—a prison sentence, a child who would grow without knowing why her mother had done this—Max would rot because her guilt was not her child’s crime and because she had promised him the truth. Tracey would die if he hurt Jess.

Sirens closed in and the men shouted their panic and threats while Tracey sobbed and Shauna closed her eyes.

Her baby was safe as long as she let Tracey live.

In the rapid tap of rain striking tables and benches and in the scent of grass and summer light, she heard Max’s deep laugh.

And she thought about the years and decades ahead of her child growing while Tracey grew old. Jess in her thirties with her own children when Tracey was in her sixties.

Jess a grown woman when Tracey passed away from old age.

The flies in the next room were gone. In their place, the fading aroma of a summer rain.