I may as well come out with it. That letter I opened from the fertility clinic over breakfast was supposed to be good news. My swimmers were an Olympic team. The ice baths and the boxers and the no-alcohol and the oysters, all those wild experiments to improve my fertility, were for nothing. I’d been confused, trying to figure it out, until I’d called the clinic. They told me my wife had been delighted to hear the news, which they’d passed on seeing as I kept missing their calls. I told them I hadn’t missed any calls, and when they’d checked, I realised they had Erin’s number, not mine, on their call list. She’d told them that I’d prefer to be mailed the results; they had a note on my file. And they’d had the right address all this time, so they couldn’t understand why I kept emailing to request they mail another. Amid that conversation was when I remembered Erin’s insistence to be the first to get the mail. Telling me the first letter was lost in the post. The second rain damaged.

All of that had torn through my mind like a cyclone as I read the letter over breakfast that morning. It had been sheer luck that I’d been to the letterbox ahead of Erin. Maybe she’d done it so many times she’d gotten complacent. As I read, the dark, mistrustful thought to check the bins, which were sitting on the front kerb, had crept in. I’d come back with foul juice from week-old stir-fry running down one wrist, clutching a small aluminium packet. You know the ones, they’re labelled with the days of the week.

Goodbye flint.

None of that mattered now. She’d saved my life. She was still here.

I could subconsciously feel the three people behind me, pressing in. They were spotting me, in case I fainted again, but it felt oppressive. I was acutely aware that someone had tried to send that coffin to the bottom of the lake. Maybe they’d wanted to kill me too, or maybe I’d just got in the way. Michael had sent me there, which was suspicious, but he’d gone to too much effort to bring the coffin up the mountain to simply get rid of it. If he’d wanted to lure me into a trap to kill me, he would have dangled something better in front of my face. Or just attacked me in the Drying Room. Whether I trusted him completely or not, he had let me in on a deadly secret. Now I had to ask him how it all fit together.