Nefyn’s eyes opened, found focus. Her hair was wet, her skin salty. Her bones ached. She had made her way back inside and was lying amongst the broken glass of the cabinets. The door was still open, banging occasionally in the morning breeze. She tried to move. She had cuts on her arms. She pulled herself to sit, shivering. The windows were still intact, but there were pools of water on the floor from the leaking roof. Despite the destruction, she felt a strange calm.

She pulled herself up to standing and unpicked a shard of glass from the skin of her forearm. Let it drop to the floor. She tested her walk, moved towards the kitchen, leant her back on the doorframe and looked over at the row of tablets waiting for her. Then she thought of the one who put them there, furrowed her brow, drew him near to her in her mind. He was safe. She could feel it. Ever since they had been in the womb together, she always knew deep down whether he was in trouble. She had only felt her heart lurch once, when he had gone with some friends to leap off the rocks at Porth y Wrach and started showing off. She had run there from the cottage, shouting. Knowing there was something wrong. Arrived to find him standing on the arch, waiting to jump. He had been furious, his friends falling about with laughter. He had hauled her away by her arm, swearing. She had seen him, though, in her mind, blood running down his face, his chest; his friends, the ones that were laughing now, pale-faced and panicked. She considered the tablets a moment, before turning and walking barefoot over the broken glass towards the door.

The cove was at once strange and familiar. Changed but the same. Boulders had moved, seaweeds ripped from rockfaces. The boatshed door had split on one side. Nefyn let her feet find the shale, allowed it to ground her. It was a slack-water sea far away. Lines of debris washed further up the beach than usual. She would find extraordinary things after storms. Blind fish, their forms grotesque and bulging, from distant worlds. Bottles. Seeds from shores at the other side of the globe. Her eyes scanned the strandline. There would be seaweeds that only grew in deep water, and kelp. Molluscs, their tongues lolling, egg cases and shells. Jumbled together in a mass of living things. Summer storms would bring drifts of jellyfish, gelatinous and stranded, and Nefyn’s favourites, the by-the-wind sailors, blue when found, then fragile and papery when kept. They spent their whole lives being carried by currents and blown by the wind. There would be sea spume, too, creamy and voluminous, rolling in clouds along the tideline.