It was stormy in the islands; Alice shivered as she took a taxi into town: the wind was bending people in half on the high street, sweeping sheets of seawater over the harbour wall. She went via the bakery at Lerston, even though it was well out of the way, for with the clean island air in her blood she was immediately craving fat and sugar; and by the time the taxi reached Harcourt House, and a dozen doughnuts became ten, the trees in the wood were pulsing and stretching like epic dancers, and she saw that a window on the first floor had blown open. The library window. Alice let herself in and walked upstairs. The house appeared to be empty. Eva had texted to say that somebody would be home, but Alice heard nothing. On the windowsill, Zoe’s biology textbook was lying, soaking up the rain, acquiring new girth and dimension. A page stuck out as a bookmark to the chapter on human reproduction. Alice opened up the paper. It was waterlogged only along the edges. Zoe had drawn a diagram, in her neat, italic teenage writing, of what looked like a monthly chart of a woman’s menstrual cycle. In five different-colour pens the girl had written out different phases: days of creativity (‘spring’) juxtaposed with days of internal self-examination (‘winter’). Alice put the paper back on the desk. As far as she was concerned, her own menstrual cycle was a complete mystery; she had lived with it for over two decades now, without discerning any connection to the moon. She would’ve been useless as a hunter-gatherer (or ‘gatherer-hunter’, as a vegan friend had recently corrected her, the Mesolithic diet having been at least sixty per cent nuts and tofu). Thank goodness nobody ever asked her to navigate by the stars. But then: she had grown up with the menstrual cycle as a curse rather than a superpower. She picked the paper up again, and studied it. Next to bleeding, Zoe had written ‘Monthly meditation; vision quest; deep listening to self; time out.’ Outside, the wind was circling the house, faster and faster, pushing at the windows, probing the roof tiles. Alice remembered how much Eva loved the storms; they remind me why I live in the islands, she liked to say. To Alice, the islands felt strange, vulnerable, as if they were about to flood, as the whole world was, and the islands first, probably, inundated with salt and folly.

Alice loved coming here; but also, it felt a bit crazy. Like, something was bound to give. Everything Eva was doing was just too much, somehow.