My father wouldn’t leave the beach. In the end I wrapped my T-shirt around Dina—it was heavy with seawater, her shivering got worse—hoisted her over my shoulder and carried her back to the caravan. Geraldine stumbled along beside me, holding Dina up when my grip slid.

We pulled off Dina’s nightie—she was cold as a fish and gritted all over with sand—and wrapped her in everything warm we could find. Mum’s cardigans smelled of her; maybe that was what made Dina yelp like a kicked puppy, or maybe our clumsiness hurt her. Geraldine stripped like I wasn’t there and climbed into Dina’s bunk with her, pulled the duvet over both their heads. I left them there and went to find someone.

The light was turning yellow and the other caravans were starting to wake up. A woman in a summer dress was filling her kettle at the tap, with a couple of toddlers dancing around her, splashing each other and screaming with giggles. My dad had dropped to the sand by the waterline, hands hanging uselessly at his sides, staring at the sun rising over the sea.

Geri and I were covered head to toe in cuts and scrapes. The paramedics cleaned up the worst ones—one of them let out a low whistle when he saw my feet; I didn’t understand why until much later. Dina got taken to hospital, where they said she was physically fine apart from mild hypothermia. They let Geri and me take her home and look after her, until they decided my father wasn’t planning to “do anything silly” and they could let him out. We made up aunts and told the doctors they would help.

After two weeks, our mother’s dress came up in a Cornish fishing boat’s nets. I identified it—my father couldn’t get out of bed, I wasn’t about to let Geri, that left me. It was her best summer dress, cream silk—she had saved up—with green flowers. She used to wear it to Mass, when we were in Broken Harbor, then for Sunday lunch at Lynch’s and our walk along the strand. It made her look like a ballerina, like a laughing tiptoe girl off an old postcard. When I saw it laid out on a table in the police station, it was streaked brown and green from all the nameless things that had woven around it in the water, fingered it, caressed it, helped it on its long journey. I might not even have recognized it, only I knew what to look for: Geri and I had spotted it missing, when we packed away her things to leave the caravan.

That was what Dina had heard on the radio, with my voice swirling around it, the day I caught this case. Dead, Broken Harbor, discovered the body, State pathologist is at the scene. The near impossibility of it would never have occurred to her; all the rules of probability and logic, the neat patterns of center lines and cat’s-eyes that keep the rest of us on the road when the weather is wild, those mean nothing to Dina. Her mind had spun out into a smoking wreck of bonfire noises and gibberish, and she had come to me.