When Juliette first died, I indulged in desperate fantasies where I could hold her again even if only for five minutes. I promised everything in my power for the chance to bury my face in her hair, to smell her, feel her weight on my lap, wrap my arms around her and tell her I loved her one last time. From an inner core of madness I went on making my promises, stuffing the dam until the certain knowledge I would never see her again, drowned me.

Southern Britain stopped moving two days ago. We’d had hurricane-strength winds which had blown several trees down in our village, cutting off two access roads. Fallen trees meant no trains were running in or out of Essex, and this was the day we expected Elodie home for her first brief visit from university in over a month.

I know it’s not logical, but Elodie’s absence has had for my doom-primed subconscious a shadow of Juliette’s. Now with the uncertainty of Elodie’s presence I remembered my crazed longing for my other daughter. I couldn’t let myself look forward to seeing Elodie. Besides, Steph, the rational, shook a grim head all day at the news from the rail company website.

Then a text… Elodie had boarded the first train that ran out of her university town that evening and was en route to London. At that point there were no trains from there to Essex. Over the next two hours we refreshed the website, and saw at last that a sporadic service had resumed. Elodie could come home.

She arrived to a house lit by candles – our power had been knocked out earlier in the day – and ran silently to hug me. I’d improvised a huge meal in the gloom. Steph, Pierre, Raphi, Celeste and I became cartoons, hysterical pastiches of ourselves at being ‘complete’ again. Little was clear in the half-light – nothing felt real. Then it seemed before we could touch her, she had gone again. It was as though we had dreamed her.

Another snatching of precious smoke happened that same storm day. My oldest female friend, Gabi, moved with her family to Australia six years ago. In a belated brainwave, we Skyped for the first time – she in her shorts and me in warm tights, me pointing the iPad camera at the garden and its wind-toppled fence panels and she angling the lens so I could see her sleeping, five-year-old son who I have never met. We grinned at each other’s expressions, our jokes sharp and intense through the distance, and yet utterly familiar. I felt as though I had spent a half hour in her company. She and her family populate my dreams, like Juliette does, and Elodie has begun to – the people I love, who aren’t with me.

I only wish death was undone so simply, with a train journey, or the flick of a camera switch.