Annie couldn’t sleep. She had mentally redecorated Saltwater Nook and put together a three-course bistro menu—mental organizing was usually a great soother—but still sleep evaded her. The evening’s events kept playing on a loop behind her eyes. Fear and relief, fear and relief filled her chest repeatedly. She wondered if Alfred was okay. Maeve had messaged the group at half past midnight to say that Alfred was comfortable and that she was heading home. Though she wanted Alfred back to his old self as soon as possible, she hoped he was incapacitated enough tonight that he wouldn’t make a break for it and disappear off into the back streets of Margate.

Annie was glad she didn’t have a clock that ticked in the bedroom. Somehow a ticking clock seemed to elongate the hours when you couldn’t sleep. She’d read somewhere about the phenomenon of dry-drowning, and snippets of what she’d read returned to her now, despite her best efforts to dismiss it. Was that a thing? Dry-drowning? Was it only in children? She couldn’t remember. She began to worry about John dry-drowning on the sofa. Why wouldn’t he just go to hospital like a normal person? Now I’m responsible for him! She ran through the symptoms list Georgina had given her. How could she check these things from her bedroom?

After several long minutes of panicking that John might be dying quietly in the sitting room, she got up and tiptoed along the hall—silently cursing every squeaking floorboard—to the dark sitting room. She could just make out his silhouette. She listened hard and was rewarded with the sound of his breathing, slow and steady. Relieved, Annie crept back to her room, climbed into bed, and fell into a fitful sleep. She woke with a start at a quarter to two and tiptoed back into the sitting room, where she waited until she heard John breathing before returning to bed. After much tossing and turning, she drifted off again, only to wake up at ten to three in a panic that had no meaning before the events of the previous came crashing back to her with startling clarity.

When she crept in again at twenty past four, by now an expert in avoiding all the squeaky floorboards, she couldn’t hear anything. With fast-rising panic, Annie stepped farther into the room, holding her own breath, the better to hear his. There was a rustling sound from the sofa, and she let out her breath. She blinked into the gloom of the encroaching dawn and could make out John’s outline. She’d taken a step backward to creep back to her room when John’s outline moved, and she froze. John lifted his arm, the corners of the blankets in his hand, and shuffled back flat against the sofa.

“Come on,” he said in a gravelly whisper.

Annie hesitated.