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He plays for his sister, because she asks. He doesn’t want to, might even be a little frightened of it, but the truth is he would do anything for her.

He sits by his bedroom window to tune the fiddle quickly and with an ear honed over years of practice. He tightens the bow strings. He doesn’t hold the instrument high under his chin but rests it almost lazily on his shoulder. And then he plays.

Fen is sprawled on his bed to listen. tries something upbeat at first, because the point of this is to make her worry less about him, but soon the music overcomes, it sweeps him away and morphs into something else, an expression of something obscured. He is powerless to it, in the same way he is powerless to his anger. He wonders if this is what he is, all that he is, a leaf battered by one wind or the other.

While he plays, as if conjured by his song, a thick fog rolls in from the ocean, closing them off from the rest of the world. Fen sits up to watch it, but keeps playing. He doesn’t need to see them to know where they are. The fuel tanks.

There is no fog on the day it happens. Which makes the sight visible from a great distance; you can see the fuel tanks the entire walk down the hill. He makes this walk alone. Numb. Eyes on the swinging body.

When he gets to the bottom, he doesn’t know what to do, can’t make sense of the problem, so he sits on the grass beneath Alex.

It takes a little while for his family to reach him. Just Dom and Fen; they have left Orly at the lighthouse. Both his father and sister try to hold him, but he can’t, he can’t be touched. He just needs their help solving this problem because he can’t move either, can’t make his mind work.

It is Dominic who sorts it out, as he sorts out everything. For a moment reflects on the feeling of safety this has always provided him with, the knowledge that his father can solve any problem, is capable of anything. Except that he can’t bring back the dead, can he. There is that. And from this loss, will never feel safe again.

Fen climbs up the metal ladder to the foot railing. She gets down on her hands and knees and reaches with her Stanley knife, and she starts to saw through the rope.

Dom is waiting on the ground, ready to catch Alex. There is only about a meter drop from boots to shoulder, but that will feel like a lot with the entire weight of a body bearing down on him. There is no other way to get him down; he is far too heavy to try to pull back up by the rope, by the neck—

“Here it goes, Dad,” Fen calls.

And it’s this image that will stay with him. The sight of Alex’s body hanging at a distance as made that long, long walk—that will linger for a good while too, it will be there when he closes his eyes, but it will eventually fade. While this moment, right now, will remain vivid until his last breath. The sight of Alex’s body slumping down onto his father, who reaches for it, who takes the weight of it upon himself, and can see that Dom is trying to be so gentle, that it is like an embrace, and it’s this that sets Dom off balance, that makes his knees buckle under the weight, and they go to the ground, cradled together.