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is up early, and walks the hill track to find his sister. She is on the beach, as always. He wonders at the kind of person you’d have to be to hate shelter, to want only exposure. The same, he supposes, as someone who has to punch and punch and punch. Longing takes on different forms.

Fen is using a thick chunk of driftwood to mark the height of the high tide. The seals are farther down the beach, honking and barking and bleating. He can’t spot any penguins today, but the shags on their rock are like a dark cloud, rising and falling. Fen waves to him and waits for him to reach her.

“Higher again?” he asks.

“Higher again.”

Soon there won’t be a beach here at all.

They go to her little campsite and he takes out the container of food he’s brought. Last night’s leftovers, unheated. He stokes the campfire, searching for coals, but Fen doesn’t bother heating up the cold steak. She eats it with her hands, juices running down her chin like the wild animal she is becoming. Though truthfully she has always been a bit fey, a bit other . He flicks her forehead. “Savage.”

Fen smiles.

“Come back with me.”

“I can’t, y.”

He does not understand why. Not truly. He knows she has been frightened badly, and he knows his dad is not a man capable of acknowledging fear, except to tell them to get it out of the body, to physically force it away, which is not how Fen copes, and so she has come down here to be alone with the animals and the ocean. misses her as he would a limb cut off. That’s how they’ve spent most of their lives, joined heart and mind. He is scared of what leaving this island will do to that connection, but maybe that’s stupid; it existed before they came here.

They spot Dominic and Orly headed down the hill, just two little shapes in the distance, a wide gray sky at their backs. After a while the larger of the two swings the smaller one up onto his shoulders.

“How will either of them survive on the mainland,” Fen says, not really a question.

None of them, included, know how to imagine another life. Still, he thinks, Fen needs people her own age. wants for her the things he was lucky enough to have found, by some miracle, with Alex. He wants her to forget Shearwater.

He knows, as his dad does, that he’s failed to protect her. That he got wrapped up with Alex and forgot to look after his sister. He wakes in a cold sweat sometimes, thinking about this, hating himself.

But she is still here.

“He doesn’t want to leave,” says, of Dominic.

Fen frowns. “Don’t we have to?”

“What would you want, if you had the choice?”

He watches his sister contemplate this. She is looking at the seals farther down the beach. “When I think about leaving,” she says, “I almost can’t breathe. But staying here is killing us.”

“So it’s shit either way.”

Fen smiles. “We’ll be okay. There’ll be somewhere else.”

But will there ever be, he thinks, another home for the four of them to share? The second they leave Shearwater, Fen, who is younger than but who has finished school years ahead of him, is going to leave them to start her new life, and doesn’t know what he can do to stop this. It has always been his job to keep them together, to keep them strong.

“What if Dad won’t go?” he asks.

“We have to make him,” Fen says.

That’s all well and good but there’s no making Dominic Salt do anything he doesn’t want to do. Stubborn is too small a word for what he is.

“I know you’re sure that leaving Shearwater will fix the problem,” says, the problem being their mother. “But what if she just goes with him?”

Given that Claire is not an actual ghost but their father’s grief and loneliness made manifest, this seems likely to .

Fen looks at her brother, shakes her head. “No, Shearwater is a bridge.”

He is impressed by her certainty, but then she’s always been this way, sure of things, sure of herself. She has a pure and simple belief that there are ghosts on this island. Orly’s the same. He doesn’t know what goes on in his dad’s head but he’s heard Dom talking to thin air. Sometimes feels like the only sane person here.

Orly arrives first, barreling into so their bodies go down in a tangle. laughs as his brother tries to pin him. Fen comes to his aid, wrestling Orly onto the sand, tickling the boy mercilessly. All three stop and brush themselves off when Dom arrives. He looks very serious this morning. What, thinks warily, has gone wrong now?

“I’ve learned something about our guest,” he says calmly. It seems to take him forever to go on. “She’s Hank’s wife.”

Fen looks startled and it reminds of how their dad always says this expression is their mother’s. Claire wore a look of perpetual surprise. doesn’t remember that, but he remembers his mum’s hands very well, the neatly manicured half-moon nails and the slender length of her fingers, even the smell of the hand cream she used to wear. He thinks of this, right now, in this moment, as a way of not spiraling into panic.

“Why’s she here?” he asks.

“She’s come looking for Hank. I don’t know why.”

Fen sinks to the ground and rests her head in her hands. “Oh my god.”

“It’s alright,” Dom says. “It doesn’t matter. We carry on.”

“What if—”

“All we need to do,” he says, “is keep our mouths shut.”

marvels at his dad’s even keel. He is always even, always calm. knows, in this moment, the way he sometimes knows what his sister is thinking, that Fen is imagining the same thing he is: that sudden, calm violence Dominic Salt is capable of, and the damage it can do.