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The fire is too big. That’s the thought he has as they approach. He knows before anyone else does. He’s always been able to read his sister’s mind, just a little. He knows, too, why she would do such a thing, but he doesn’t have the same hope she does. Just a sick question: Is this what will break them?

He moves into the front of the group carrying their foil-wrapped food. He isn’t sure what to do but he thinks he should get ahead of it somehow.

“Dad,” he says, as they reach the sand.

“Yeah?” Dom seems lighter, and it leaves an even deeper pit in ’s stomach.

“It’s not to hurt you,” he says.

Dom frowns, confused, and then a wariness fills his eyes, and then, as they reach the bonfire and he sees what Fen is putting onto it, something like disbelief.

“Dad,” Fen says. Pleading. Apologetic. But she carries on, she throws a book onto the flames and a strangled sound comes from Dom. He lurches forward to rescue it, and his sleeve is alight, and before can even think what to do, as he watches on in shock, Rowan is removing her own jacket and using it to smother the flames on Dom’s arm.

Belatedly grabs his little brother and lifts him into his arms. He can feel Orly’s heart racing against his chest.

Dom is staring at the burned edges of the book, and at the fire, at all the things he can make out among the flames. Nothing remains unburned.

“Why?” he asks Fen.

“To free you,” she answers.

isn’t sure his dad will reply. He doesn’t for a long time. Then Dom says, “I had no idea you had such cruelty in you.”

Fen’s face falls, tears flooding.

Dom sinks to the ground and rests his head between his raised knees, and he weeps. He didn’t do this when Claire died. Not that ever saw. He never broke, not once. Now he is asunder and doesn’t know what to do.

“Go back to the boathouse,” Rowan tells Fen. “All three of you. Stay there until I come find you.”

Then she goes to Dom and she crouches behind him and puts her arms around his shoulders, and she holds him with her lips pressed to his neck, his cheek, and what’s more, Dom lets her. The sight is so shocking to —and, he thinks, to his brother and sister too—that they are wordless as they walk to the boathouse. He carries Orly, and Fen cries silently beside them.

Within the little shack, settles his brother and sister on the mattress under the blankets and sets their plates of dinner beside them. Fen has composed herself for the sake of her brother and reads to Orly from whatever she’s partway through. waits to make sure they’re okay before he succumbs to the thing building within. “I’ll be back,” he says, can barely say, and then he walks from the boathouse and back up the hill, not looking at his dad on the sand or the flames beside him, not looking back at the fuel tanks to where the swinging body will be waiting for him. He walks all the way up past the lighthouse, and he keeps on. Up a different peak. To the communications building at the very top. It is astounding, actually, that the rage survives this long, with this much exertion to wear it out. He is expecting it to be gone by the time he gets here but it isn’t, it is as vivid as ever. Because he can’t stop thinking how utterly wrong this is. This wasn’t supposed to be their life. He doesn’t know how to save them from it, how to hold them together, and he’s furious with Fen for doing this, and with his dad for letting it get so bad that she felt she had to. Dom is just letting her drift away, drift right out to sea, and he isn’t doing a thing to stop it. And is livid with himself, too, for never being able to save anyone.

He takes his hydrophone, this precious thing his dad saved up and gifted him, this thing that brought him so much joy, that he shared with Alex, and he smashes it to pieces.

It is only later, when he has emerged, that he thanks fate or the universe or luck that his violin was not here too.

Rowan is right. He can’t go on like this. He needs to find something else.