She just likes mud, says Logan. Especially bad-smelling mud. Dogs like nothing more than smelling bad.

Bad to you, delicious to her, says Jules.

It was true enough. He grips his wife’s hand and kisses her.

I love that we have a stupid dog, he says. One needs to feel superior to something.

The path bends around to the left, and soon enough they are crossing the quiet road and are on the beach.

We’ll have to get her in the water, says Jules, picking up a large pebble. She might go for this. She lobs the stone into the sea, but the dog isn’t as foolish as all that. The waves are up, and she’s wary of the breakers.

They separate for beachcombing. Jules finds a spray of seaweed, not unlike the rag-rope toys one buys at pet shops. Achilles is there in an instant: bark, bark. But refuses to follow it into the waves. Logan finds a small stalk of cow parsley, but it is so light that, as he throws it, the wind grabs the thing and blows it further up the beach.

Here! says Jules, dragging a long piece of newish-looking wood from some abandoned project.

Perfect, says Logan. As soon as he lifts it into the air, the dog is all wag and bark and jump. Big wood, big wood. As Jules had done before, but without the commentary, Logan wobbles it over the dog’s head, pretends to throw it twice, before lobbing it into the waves. Achilles follows without a thought, leaping through the surf like a launching battle craft until she reaches the smoother water beyond the breakers. She snatches it and turns around slowly, her tail an ineffective rudder. Her face is still black all the way to her eyes.

She’s not ducking her face, giggles Jules.

If there was something that would sink a bit, says Logan.

Try again!

And so they do, cracking up at each failure, the sun ducking in and out of clouds. The two of them, and the dog between them, are enough to feel like a family. It is Logan, Jules and Achilles, the three of them, and nothing is wrong.

Again and again, Logan lobs the half-plank into the water. Like an athlete, he thinks, in the most primitive Olympics, before the hammer and the javelin, when there was only whatever hunk of wood a person could find. If the prize is a clean dog, he will never reach the podium. The dog is grinning and uncleanable. It is the dog, trotting back out of the waves time and again with the same black nose, that has Jules bent double with laughter.