Harry flicked him a frowning glance.

Staring at Harry, Rory said, ‘Tell her. She’s not your dad. Tell her.’

Harry sat perfectly still.

Clancy knew she was missing something vital. ‘You can tell me anything you like,’ she said carefully, hoping she was right.

‘Rory can’t go to uni, he hasn’t got the UCAS points,’ Harry burst out. ‘And I don’t want to go without Rory.’

Rory gave Clancy a sad smile. ‘I’m not clever. I went to college for bricklaying but I got stuck in this cycle of resits for GCSEs in maths and English ’cos I couldn’t get the grade. They give you a scribe but I just get muddled. I got some BTECs though.’

‘You’re dyslexic and you like to work with your hands,’ Harry snapped. ‘It’s different to being not clever.’

‘Right.’ Clancy felt sorry for them and didn’t ask Rory why he hadn’t got a job yet. They’d obviously been brought up so closely in this tiny community that they were like twins, reluctant to break away and face the world each on their own. ‘Most people make new friends at uni—’

‘I want to live with Rory,’ Harry spat, flushing furiously. ‘But Dad says it’s no good Rory getting a job wherever I go to uni because they can’t afford me to live out. It’s more expensive. I’d have to live in halls, not with him.’

Clancy shut her mouth on what she was about to say next because she suddenly had an idea of what she’d been missing.

Rory looked at Harry but it was to Clancy he spoke, defiantly. ‘We’re a couple.’

Aaron sat on the bench on his patio alternately gazing out to sea and rubbing teak oil into the mahogany body of the guitar across his lap. Nelson lay full-length on the paving in the hot sun and twitched in his sleep. It was Sunday afternoon and, though it was a sight Aaron had seen a thousand times, he was fascinated by the white, curvy clouds that bounced over the sky, the sun dancing on the restless sea. It was windy – what a shock – and he wore a baseball cap back to front to keep his hair from his eyes.

Clancy was coming to see him. She’d left him a message on his answering machine. He wished that expecting her didn’t make him feel like his insides were fizzing. He’d stayed away from her as much as he could since he’d realised just how not over her ex she was, despite the receptive way she’d greeted his kisses. He knew a little about rebound relationships from watching Lee. They sucked. Nobody got what they needed.

Aaron wasn’t going to be Clancy’s rebound. He refused.

One day, Clancy would do the disappearing thing, like Alice. What was there to keep her in Nelson’s Bar? After the summer, when the sea breeze became a gale and sunshine became horizontal rain, what would she do then?

Obvious answer? Leave.

Aaron hadn’t always been averse to summer romances. In his late teens, tourists coming and going from Hunstanton every week or two, he’d even squeezed several romances into one summer. But now that he was thirty-six, the appeal had gone from being able to see the end of the relationship right from the beginning.