Someone steps on my toes but I apologise, then apologise again as I’m elbowed so suddenly in the ribs it almost knocks me off my feet. I lose sight of Dev for a moment. Mercifully, I find her on a quieter patch of the beach, the music dampening to more of a sluggish BOOM BOOM BOOM. I close my eyes and try to snatch at a breath, because being here feels like that time I fell into the deep end of the swimming pool when I was a kid and my father had to fish me out. When I open my eyes again, I see that it’s snowing, falling in fat white clumps that catch in my eyelashes as it falls around us. My first thought should be Rosh and how happy she must be to see it. Or of Poppy in red mittens, snowflakes melting in her hair. But my first thought is of reading To Kill a Mockingbird at school and laughing when Scout saw snow for the first time and told Atticus that the world was ending.

I turn to look at the tangle of people. Some have their arms in the air, others their heads tipped back, laughing up at the dark sky, but something isn’t right. It’s like the furniture in the bedroom back at the bookshop – nothing goes together. It’s a bit like last night, when wildly disparate groups of friends were thrown together. But they didn’t mix, did they? They kept in their groups – played their own music and drank their own beer – until midnight and the space between them disappeared as they rang in the New Year together.

Or at least, I assume that’s what happened.

I wasn’t there to see it, was I?

Here everyone’s blended together. A woman with a waist-length silver plait is having an earnest conversation with a guy my age while a girl with neat braids laughs and claps at a man, utterly enchanted by his dad dancing.

None of it makes sense.

And no one is touching. There are no couples kissing or friends hugging when they’re reunited after being lost in the chaos. No one is drinking, either. A couple of people are, the light from the bonfire sparking off the beer cans in their hands, but most aren’t. They’re just wandering around, talking and dancing.

‘You all right, Dev?’ I hear someone say and look back as a guy dressed in black approaches.

When she smiles and nods, he salutes her with two fingers then keeps going.

‘Do you know all these people, Dev?’

She shrugs. ‘Not all of them.’

‘Who are they?’

‘Reapers.’

‘What?’ I turn to look at the crowd again. ‘All of them?’

‘Most of them, yeah.’

I turn back to her with a frown. ‘Brighton has all of these reapers?’

‘They’re not just from Brighton, they’re from all over. Worthing. Eastbourne. Hastings.’