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She’s lying to me. I don’t know why or about what, but I’ve seen shifty enough to recognize it. My granddad lived with us when I was a kid, just me, him, and Dad, and he’d always be up to some scheme or other, coming home in the middle of the night after breaking into a worksite or getting into a scuffle with his old biker mates; any way a guy could think to get in trouble, my granddad had done it first. He was a piece of work, but I loved him, and what’s more, he taught me not only how to box but how to sense when someone is lying.

Weird theories chase themselves around in my mind about who this woman is and what she could be doing here. I go a few rounds with the bag to try to clear my head, get some perspective about what her presence means for us—now that I know she’s unlikely to be dying anytime soon. Possibly it means very little. She’s another mouth to feed, but she should also be another set of hands to help out. Possibly it means we’re in trouble; it will depend on what she’s lying about.

I find Raff in the laundry, hand-scrubbing the sheets Rowan’s been sleeping on, now stained with blood. He won’t get those stains out by hand, even with the bleach, but he’s putting a lot of elbow grease into the effort, I’ll give him that.

“You get a read on her?” I ask.

He glances at me, then nods through the window. I cross to his side and peer out. On the grass a little way down the hill is my youngest, doing some kind of performance with wild arm movements for a baffled-looking Rowan, who is hunched on the ground uncomfortably.

“She’s a bit rough around the edges, but anyone would be,” Raff says. After a moment he adds, “I think he’s acting out a movie,” and we both smile.

I take the second sink and give the sheets another round of scrubbing. Intermittently we watch the stranger; I watch the way she watches my son, wondering what she’s thinking.

“She was worried,” Raff says abruptly. “When I told her the researchers had left the island.”

My gaze travels over her shaved head. I wonder why she’s cut her hair so short. I wonder a lot of things. She is dwarfed in one of my windbreakers, but I see movement in the lines of her shoulders that tells me she’s laughing. “An abandoned island is less hospitable than a populated one,” I suggest.

“Yeah,” Raff says. “But it seemed different from that. Like it wasn’t what she was expecting.”

The words confirm something and cause a skittishness beneath my skin. I don’t like wild cards.

The wind picks up, making it too unpleasant for Orly and Rowan to be outside. I watch them hurry back toward us, then run my hand quickly over Raff’s short blond hair. “Thanks, mate,” I say, with a nod to the sheets, and head out.

Six weeks. We only have to hold it together for six more weeks, a limp to the end of this disastrous season.

Lie down .

It is late and as dark as it gets on this island. I have worked hard all day, harder even than I usually do. My body is so tired it can barely function. Exhaustion, I have found, is useful not only for my son’s rage but also for grief. Grief finds power in the strength of my limbs, and if I happen to make it to the end of a day without having completely shattered myself, grief will be fueled by whatever’s left of my energy. It will overcome.

But tonight I am liquid.

Lie down , she says, and I do.

My children are asleep, two of them under this roof, the third in a boathouse down a hill. I sent Raff down earlier with dinner for Fen, as I do each night, unable to go myself, terrified of my inability to say the right thing. If I go down there I’ll hurt her worse, so I stay away, I leave her be.

Close your eyes , my wife says, a figure beside me on the bed.

“What if she’s come because she knows something?” I ask aloud.

What could she know?

I shake my head. “I don’t know. The timing feels weird.”

Shhh. It doesn’t matter. Close your eyes.

I close my eyes. I imagine the curve of her hip, her waist, the shape of her breasts, I can feel them. Her warmth seems real, her breath on my lips. Her hand on my body, or is it my own hand, they are the same, it doesn’t matter where I end and she begins.

But maybe I shouldn’t be allowing Orly to spend so much time with the stranger, he has been sleeping on the end of her bed like a lost puppy.

She is warm, and new, and interesting , my wife explains.

I shouldn’t let him get attached.

Why not?

She’s a stranger.

Only until she’s not.

I feel the full press of her, and my mind finally starts to clear.

That’s enough now, no more thinking.

And so I stop thinking and give myself over to her, to the memory of her and yet it’s more than that, isn’t it? It feels like so much more than that, a possession, almost, her body upon mine, moving gently, overcoming me.

My last thought, though, before I fall asleep, is not of the woman beside me but of the other. Why is she here?