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She could hear Susie calling her name, but she just waved her hand, as if to silently communicate ‘Things have gone batshit, I’ll fill you in later.’ But a hand clasping her shoulder literally stopped her in her tracks and she turned on the spot to see Abel’s mum.

‘Diane, I know the drinks are late but I’ve got to speak to Abel. It’s . . . it’s complicated.’

Diane pursed her glossy lips. ‘Oh, don’t I know it. Come with me, Temperance. Margie can get her own sodding gin. We need to talk.’

Temperance had only very rarely been upstairs at The Witch’s Nose. The pub downstairs felt like Margie’s living room, open to all, but going upstairs was like peeking in her underwear drawer.

She lowered herself awkwardly onto the chintzy velveteen settee and sunk right down into its softness.

‘Not really the time for a cuppa, not if he’s told you what I think he’s told you?’ Diane raised one eyebrow.

‘He told me. About Jack Gulliver and the witch.’ Her cheeks started to burn.

With a nod, Diane went to the little shelves on one side of the ancient sunken fireplace and pulled a thick leather book from the bottom corner. ‘I know it sounds crazy. Phil told me I was crazy, even though it was his family history. But now he runs tourist boats in Thailand, so I hear. Has never reached out to his son.’ Her lip twitched. ‘But this is the proof: all these families, with one very important piece missing. The kindest, sweetest men you’d ever want to meet, but once the curse hit them—’ She snapped her fingers.

Temperance leafed through the creaking album pages: pictures of Diane and a little Abel in the nineties; Margie and her kids in seventies’ stripes of orange and brown; some photos from the fifties; black and white dog-eared pictures from further back, and back. And not one of a man beyond his early twenties, at the very best.

‘I couldn’t let my Abe become that. He had the purest heart of any of them. You two, like brother and sister for so long – I told myself that’s the way it would stay. I wanted to believe it. But you both got older, and I could see his face changing when he was with you, how he’d made you this lovely present, so . . . I had to break it to him.’

She plopped down next to Temperance.

‘He went green in the gills. The shame he felt, these big tears falling on his hoodie. He was destroyed at the very idea he could ever hurt you. But I knew he wouldn’t be able to turn those feelings off, like a tap. God knows I couldn’t for Phil. Not for a very long time. The only way was to go away and stay away. No updates on the village from Margie, no visits: no temptations. So I’m sorry, my love,’ she squeezed Temperance’s knee, ‘that we bolted. It was the best we could do. A hard but clean break.’

The shame he felt. His hoodie. The disgust, the panic she’d felt in hoodie when she’d found it in the bus stop, all those years ago, it wasn’t about her. It was about what the Gulliver curse might make him do.

‘Oh, God.’

‘Don’t blame him, will you? He’s tried so hard to keep himself distant from you this week. Always texting me in a panic that he was going to slip up. Just being in the same room as you turns him upside down. It’s hard, Temperance, awfully hard. But it’s the only way. You’ll write me off as a nut job now, all this talk of curses and witches, what have you, but even if you do, I’ve said my piece. And I’ve done my best by you all.’ Her lips formed a flat smile.

‘It’s really the only way?’ Temperance asked in a small voice as Diane stood and moved to leave, to rejoin the party they could hear going on through the window without them.

‘I’m afraid so. You don’t want you heartbroken by a Gulliver, darling. Believe me. They fill your heart up like no other, till it doubles in size, it feels like. Then when they leave you, all you have is that huge emptiness.’

A cheer went around the table on the green, the clink of glass on glass singing up at Temperance as laughter rippled through the crowd. She had never felt more on the outside of something.

And then the thunder came.

Temperance took the stairs as quickly as her pencil skirt would allow and followed Diane out through the thick, oak door in the porch.

The laughter she’d heard just minutes before turned to groans and boos as thick raindrops, like splattering pearls, hit the party on the head, landed in their drinks and started making Gary’s baps soggy. But Temperance was only vaguely aware of the panic at the lunch table. She couldn’t take her eyes off the clouds. The rolling clouds. The purple rolling clouds.

It’s coming. The doom is coming. The premonition fulfilled.

‘Well, this wasn’t on my weather app!’ Margie hollered crossly, gathering all the plates she could muster. ‘All hands on deck – get this lot inside, loves! The show will go on.’

Diane squeezed past Temperance to head back inside and reappeared in a moment with a stack of bar trays. ‘Hang on, Marge, this will help.’

Temperance felt welded to the spot by the scene in front of her. All those nightmares: now they were on her doorstep. And she had no idea what to do next. This didn’t feel like a campfire-and-a-bottle-of-Malibu problem. This felt huge.

The words of F’s last email came back to Temperance and she felt the air get pulled out of her lungs. Whether it was a lack of faith or some Wiccan telepathy, F had hit the nail right on the head: the trouble had found them, and there was no more time for bodged solutions. They needed something big. Why couldn’t she have been born with Gandalf powers to whistle up a couple of giant eagles right now?!

Susie raced in, sliding a full tray of drinks effortlessly on the bar, her calm hands not matching her milk-white face. ‘Tee . . . what do we do?!’

‘I . . . I don’t know, Suse. I just don’t know.’

Stevie skittered in behind them as more of the party guests filed into the pub, looking for a dry safe-haven. She spoke in a low hush, ‘I’m guessing that these purple clouds are like—?’

‘Yup.’