Romance fails because it is never supposed to work, past the act itself, the momentum of lust. She was raised by an expert. Binny was practically Roman in her operations: arriving in the village, taking the spoils, then razing everything to the ground. Through the walls of the post office cottage Rachel could sometimes hear the sound of male weepin

Susiraja (Finnish) – Literally ‘wolf border’: the boundary between the capital region and the rest of the country. The name suggests everything outside the border is wilderness.

Please don’t, Rachel. Don’t. I’ll be no good around a baby. I don’t want to fuck that up, too. Please don’t make me. She does not understand. Only later will she understand.

She does not take her mother’s hand. Instead she finds herself repeating a line she read once, in a poem, in a book on a shelf in a house where she spent no more than a few illicit hours. Everything tends towards iron.

His belly is tight under his soft skin, glabrous, like stone wrapped in chamois leather.

Are they really so blind? she wonders. Sylvia, protecting her father, complicit in his scheme by virtue of her institutionalisation. Huib is reconciled, co-opted, too white of heart to suspect anything nefarious. She begins to feels sick. There is a conspiracy around the table, and they don’t even realise they are taking part. Even she is implicate

The worthy investment, the millions spent building a trophic Eden, it is simply another grand scheme that he can choose to dismantle again, if he so wishes. There is a bigger, more exciting game – testing beyond the cage, wolves in the real world. You godly fuck, she thinks, you absolute maniac, this is what you wanted all along.

She can see, between hills, the glint of grey water – the west coast, where once rum-runners came ashore and where nuclear cargo now ghosts along railway lines at night.

Look, she says. Binny and I didn’t get along, granted, but that has nothing to do with you and I and we shouldn’t let it muddy the water. I just think we should meet and talk. Start from scratch. Her tone is level, calm, exactly as if she were talking to volunteers, instructing them on sedation, how to inject or take a sample, inserting the syringe