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As she follows her family up the hill in the rain thinks about bodies. The dead sailor’s, of course, and all the missing bits of him. She is surprised most about the… disregard he’s been shown. That sounds stupid in her own mind but it’s the word she can’t shake. She has seen plenty of dead seals and always meets the sight with sadness and a sense of nature’s disregard for fairness or dignity. A sense that the world shows no pity for animals. She sees the way they eat each other, eat the worst bits of each other. Somehow she’s imagined people to be exempt from that disregard, but she knows now that she was wrong.

Thinking of Yen’s body leads her to think of her mother and to wonder if Claire was left in such a state. Was she peeled open and spilling before she was incinerated? Were her eyes open or closed? Did she look peaceful or monstrous? Were they careful with her, or rough? She is crying silently as she walks. feels too much, always bursting out of her body.

If she was alive, would her mother’s body look like Rowan’s does now? Would they be the same age? She tries to work it out. Sees again the way Rowan looked as they undressed her, as they warmed and stitched and bandaged her. And more privately, later, as washed her under the shower, dried and clothed her once more. She has never been naked with another woman before. She’s never seen another woman’s body, except in movies. feels so much tenderness for this poor battered form. She feels, for the first time in her life, a connection to her own woman-ness—it felt right to gather up this body and try to care for it the way women have been caring for each other since the beginning. It made feel more… herself than she has in a long time. More of the woman she wants to become. There are other ways for bodies to be treated, but she does not want to think about these.

At the lighthouse they eat together at the table, a basic dinner of sausages, mash, and steamed greens. Rain lashes against the windows, and wind screams through tiny openings and under doorways.

sees her father watching Rowan. She sees the way he is unpicking her with his eyes. She knows he is shaken by her arrival: he doesn’t like losing control, and this new person among them isn’t controllable.

After dinner he disappears upstairs—he will be doing some chore, some repair job, it will be hours before he’ll let himself stop. The pipes in the bathroom have been making weird noises lately so probably that. Raff and Orly go into the living room to fold laundry and then work on their latest Lego project, which is just about the only form of entertainment they have these days, since all their books have been read a dozen times each and there is no longer any power for movies. and Rowan clean up the kitchen and do the dishes.

“Are you okay?” asks.

Rowan glances at her as she scrubs a pan. “Don’t ask me that. I’m asking you that.”

“I’m fine. You’re the one who knew him.”

“I didn’t know him at all. I just spent a few days at sea with him.” Rowan pauses, then murmurs, “I’ll have to find his family when we get back.”

knows how the people in that family are going to feel when someone says the words he didn’t make it . That’s what her dad said when he came to find them, dressed in surgical scrubs: she didn’t make it . As though it had been a journey their mother had gone on, one she just couldn’t make her way to the end of. Though she would have tried very hard, knows that much about her mum.

“Hey,” Rowan says. “It’s okay, I’m sorry.”

wipes her tears quickly, embarrassed, god she is always crying. “Why did you cut your hair off?” she asks.

Rowan absently runs fingers over her shaved head, leaving trickles of soapy water to trail down the back of her neck. She grimaces and tries to shrug the drops away. “I wanted to feel lighter,” she says.

It is an answer understands.

Later goes upstairs to find Raff in his bedroom. He is sitting on the floor in the corner, mostly hidden behind the bed. She’s in time to catch him shoving something under his legs.

“What are you doing?” she asks.

“Nothing.”

flops onto his bed, propping her head on her hands. “How have you been charging that? Does Dad know?”

Raff sighs and pulls out the phone he tried to hide. It’s on, and he shows her a quick flash of what he’s been looking at. A photo of him and Alex.

“Raffy,” says.

Her brother turns the phone off. And throws it hard into the wall. The phone cracks down the middle and falls with a thud onto the rug.

“Hey,” she says. “Can you play me something?”

He shakes his head. He can’t talk, really, when he’s like this, though he doesn’t talk much anyway. If he would just play his violin, knows Raff would feel better, but he hasn’t touched it since Alex. He rises with explosive power and mutters, on his way past, “I’ll get to the bag.” And then he is gone, and she’s failed him.

To busy herself, to not think about how much she hates being in this building, makes tea and hot chocolate for everyone and carries a cup up to her dad. She is about to knock on his door when she hears his voice from within. She knows from the low tone, the intimacy of it, that there’s no one else in the room with him.

She leans her forehead on the door and listens to the rumbling sound of his voice. She feels too old for her life. Doesn’t know how to save him from this. She will cry again if she keeps listening. So she knocks loudly and pushes in.

“Cuppa,” she says.

“Thanks, darlin’.” He’s been standing at his wardrobe, looking at the precious things hidden within, talking to them. But he shuts the cupboard door quickly upon her intrusion.

is about to ask him if he’s ever seen a dead body, wanting maybe to express to him what she felt today, the strangeness of it and how it has imprinted like light on the backs of her eyelids, but then she remembers everything at once and feels like an idiot. “Raff’s gone to the bag,” she says instead.

Dom breathes out heavily. “Righto. Thanks.” He takes his tea and pauses long enough to give her a quick kiss on the forehead, then heads up the stairs to find his son.

waits until his footsteps have disappeared and leaves the door wide so as to hear any approach. Then she crosses to Dom’s wardrobe and opens it. In the top drawer he keeps an array of items that once belonged to Claire. There are pieces of jewelry, trinkets or knickknacks that were sentimental to her, smaller items of clothing, like the silk scarf Claire’s mother gave her when she was ’s age, a bottle of her perfume, and several of her favorite books, which she’d annotated with her thoughts. picks up one of these last, Claire’s battered old copy of Jane Eyre . She opens the worn and yellowed pages to see words underlined in pencil and notes scrawled in her mum’s handwriting in the margins. It makes her ache, to see this handwriting, to read the neat little thoughts.

Dom has brought these items from the mainland. He collects more each time he goes back and visits Claire’s parents. It has been nine years since she died, but he is still collecting, still carrying things across an ocean, still hoarding them privately in this drawer. feels hopeless when she sees these things, proof of her father’s obsession, of his prison. These are what keep Claire alive, what bind her spirit here— is sure of it. They are a prison for both her parents. So she slides Jane Eyre into the waistband of her jeans. She only ever takes one item at a time, so he won’t notice. One day, when they’re all gone, he will know, but by then it will be too late.

Everyone is going to bed now. Rowan protests a lot but will sleep on the couch. She sits quietly as the others head upstairs, feeling the hard edges of the book pressed to her body. She watches the window, a long pane of curved glass that opens onto the headland. The sky is a wash of dark clouds. Not a storm, exactly, but heavy rain.

She won’t be able to sleep on this couch, in this room. Not next to this window. Because she is quite sure she’s just seen someone walk past it.

The terror this figure fills her with is profound. It drives her up and out into the night. Her windbreaker will have to be protection enough against the weather, until she can make it to the boathouse. It’s very cold as she descends the hill, though her stolen treasure sits warm against her spine and the little green lights dance ahead to show her the way.