EFA HAD SPENT THE night comforting Emrys. He had insisted that they keep the lamp on and had lain awake all night, his arms tightly wrapped around her waist like a child, his mind far away. Efa had left him in bed this morning and had walked downstairs to the particular silence that only the aftermath of a storm brought. The light was luminous and transparent. Thin. She looked out at the harbour, where figures milled around. The first ones out assessing the damage. She had watched Emrys’s face all night, tried to quell the abject fear there. Anchor him to her. She had felt his body relax this morning, his arms loosening around her, and she knew from his breathing that he was asleep. Pushed his arms away and rolled him on to his side.

He had stopped trying to make love to her now. Stopped touching her in her sleep. The confusion and forgetting had been easier somehow; it was the reaching out for her in the dark that broke her heart. They had been young once, of course. She even remembered being caught by his older brother making love in the back of Emrys’s car. But all that had faded after the ache of the miscarriages, after the endless conversations in which they tried to prove to each other – to themselves – that with each new pregnancy, nothing could be certain. And then the practised, philosophical acceptance of each lost child, when all that they felt was cold, empty grief.

Perhaps the freedom of not being able to have children could have allowed them some pleasure in lovemaking; instead, its tantalizing possibility destroyed their hunger. It was a shock, then, for Efa, when he started reaching out again. And she had reciprocated once or twice, needing to be close to him in body if not in mind, and out of guilt. She was glad that all that had passed, and she had found a strange tenderness in being able to hold him now like a child. She turned. His voice. He was calling her. Scared that she had gone. She filled the kettle. Thought about the houses in her care and wondered whether she should call on Nefyn. She had never known a storm like that. So all-consuming. So merciless.

The birds were back. Their shrieks loud against the spent sea. The violence of its outburst was evident in the uprooted trees that littered the bay. Rocks, impossible to lift, had been tossed around like pebbles. Driftwood scattered everywhere. The birds were making the most of food brought up from the depths. The sea was stained dark, as it always was after a storm. Endless agitation having changed its very nature and composition. The waves rippled guiltily this morning, their energy lost, the breeze gentle and even. Apologetic. Contrite. Like a man the morning after beating his wife.