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“That’s great, Elsie. It’s good that you know your address. Every child should know their address.” Brooke shut down the conversation using her bright, brisk “let’s move along” voice. Since becoming a mother, she’d discovered that she had a whole armoury of voices to choose from depending on the situation. She had her “efficient mother” voice, often utilized when they were late in the mornings and she was panicking. She had her calm, reassuring “everything is going to be okay” voice, which she used whenever Elsie had friendship issues. Up until this point, she’d never needed to test an “of course we’re not going to die” voice, and she wished she’d had more time to practise it. “Why don’t you read your book, Elsie?”

“The car is making my head swimmy.”

“Then make up a story. I know you love doing that.”

“Where has the road gone, Mummy—Mommy,” Elsie corrected herself, stumbling over the word in her confusion. “I can’t see the road.”

“You don’t need to see it, honey. Daddy’s job is to think about the road. Yours is to think of your story.”

“I want to go home,” Elsie said, and Brooke felt a wash of despair.

She wanted to go home, too.

Picturing their house in London, she was swamped by homesickness. She’d decorated it for Christmas, even though they weren’t going to be there for the day itself, and felt guilty for privately wishing that they were. They’d chosen a huge tree from the forest and decorated it together. She and the girls had made ornaments and hung them on the tree. Elsie had spent hours making a star out of foiled paper. It had taken three attempts because she’d wanted it to be perfect (a trait Brooke had recognised with discomfort, knowing that she was the one who had passed it on).

But the finished product was gorgeous and every day when they walked home from school, the first thing they saw was their glorious tree twinkling in the window with its distinctive star.

Oh, how she wished she were back there now, taking the kids ice-skating and to the ballet. Having a festive drink with Matt’s parents, who were always delighted to see them but never applied pressure if they were busy. She immediately felt guilty for making comparisons. She loved her parents, she really did.

She winced as the wind howled and flung snow at the car. The noise was terrifying.

“Is Poppy still asleep, Elsie?”

Elsie turned her head to check on her sister. “Yes.”

It was hard to believe anyone could sleep through the storm, unless you knew Poppy. She could sleep through anything. The child was exactly like Matt. And Brooke knew she should be grateful for that.

When Elsie was born, she’d woken frequently in the night for the first year, and Brooke, consistently on alert and on edge, had lost her own ability to sleep. It was as if her body, after multiple thwarted attempts to rest, had given up trying. Even when Elsie had finally slept, Brooke had lain there, her senses on full alert, braced for the baby to wake up again. The sensation of the clock ticking and the knowledge that she should have been sleeping while Elsie slept had added to the pressure.

To make it worse, Matt had slept soundly through all of it. Brooke had felt envious and a little resentful that he seemed undisturbed by it all. She’d taken to tugging the bedcovers and “accidentally” kicking him, but that only resulted in him grunting and turning over in the bed. When Elsie had cried and been difficult to soothe, Brooke had worried that maybe there was something seriously wrong that she was missing. When Elsie was silent, Brooke had worried that maybe she wasn’t sleeping peacefully but was, in fact, unconscious or worse. On more than one occasion she’d woken Elsie by getting too close to check she was breathing.

In the mornings when Matt had sprung out of bed and headed to the shower, she’d lain in the bed, pale-faced and zombie-like, wondering how she was going to get through the day.

She couldn’t understand how Matt could sleep so well (Wasn’t he anxious about them? Didn’t he realise how vulnerable tiny babies were?), and he couldn’t understand why she couldn’t sleep when Elsie slept. Was that a biology thing? she’d wondered. Or was it that deep down he’d known that maternal responsibility wouldn’t let her rest, so he’d simply relinquished control. To be fair, he’d been sympathetic and done what he could to help. It was Matt who had hauled himself out of bed early at weekends to play with Elsie or take her to the park, giving Brooke time to rest and not constantly be on call.

Somehow, with teamwork they’d survived, and by the time Poppy arrived four years later, Elsie was finally sleeping and Brooke was feeling human again. She’d braced herself to go back to the beginning, but right from the start, Poppy had slept. She was a relaxed, cheerful baby and a relaxed, cheerful toddler. Elsie was the sensitive one. The two girls couldn’t have been more different.

Which explained why, even with storm drama unfolding around them, four-year-old Poppy was still sleeping soundly, and Elsie was on full alert, looking for danger.

“Why doesn’t Granny love Daddy?”

Where had that come from? Elsie had always questioned everything. Her first word hadn’t been “Mum” or “Dad,” it had been “why.”

Brooke’s head was starting to ache.

“I don’t know what you mean, Elsie. Granny adores Daddy. And Daddy adores Granny.” She ignored Matt’s sudden choking cough.

“Does he?” Elsie was desperate for reassurance. “Do you love Granny, Daddy?”

“My feelings for your grandmother overwhelm me. They cannot be easily described.” Matt was leaning forward, all his attention on the road. “Okay, enough. I’m not risking the girls’ lives for this, Brooke. I’m British. I’m not used to your wild, East Coast weather. This is more snow than I’ve seen in my entire life. How far is the next town? Village? Cowshed? Anything! At this point I don’t even care if the cows are in it.”

She had to admit that it was worse than anything she’d ever seen before and she’d grown up here. She’d experienced plenty of nor’-easters in her time. But this was on a different level.

“There should be a small village near here. Sugarbrook. If we’re on the right road then we should pass it.”

“We need to get there. And let’s hope that there’s an inn or a motel or something.”

“I don’t want to spend Christmas in a motel.” The strained threads of her control were close to snapping point. “And Sugarbrook doesn’t have a motel. It’s tiny. A few cute stores. A covered bridge. The place is popular with tourists, particularly at Christmas, but most of them don’t stay in the town. If you can even call it a town. There are a few boutique hotels close by, so I suppose most of them stay there.”