Further up the shore Flora crouches by the water’s edge, her hands full of small stones. Her shoulder blades move under her dress like tiny wings. She is a child who has never seen the sea. If there is fear of it, or wonder, none of this is visible. Only a quiet watchfulness. Sometimes she cries out at night, high, warbling calls that startle her out of sleep. I keep the door between our bedrooms open so that I can listen out for her, but she never calls for me. If I go to her she gazes up as if from a great depth; as if she has been somewhere very far away and it costs her enormous effort to return. There is something unfocused and full of terror in her eyes in those moments and I think perhaps she does not recognise me when I come to sit beside her. She rarely cried when she was a baby. Perhaps she knew, even then, that crying would not get her anywhere.

The small waves creep further up the shoreline and Flora steps hastily back beyond the water’s reach. A lone seabird wheels and calls above her, but she doesn’t turn her face to look up. In the weak sunlight, her pale hair looks almost translucent. It’s so long now, reaching nearly all the way down her back, but I don’t dare to ask her if I can trim it. If I narrow my eyes, she is just a shadow. A small shimmering smear at the sea’s edge. Some ocean sprite. A changeling child. Which she is, in some ways.

Sometimes, Max, I imagine that I see you in her. Not in the sense of any physical inheritance, but a fleeting essence. Something wary and remote. Haunted, you might say. Though her ghosts are not yours.

You wrote once that you did not believe in time, but in spaces that interlocked according to a higher order of stereometry and between which the living and the dead could move back and forth at will. A kind of ghostly curtain, perhaps. It was those of us who were still alive who might appear the more unreal in the eyes of the dead, you said. Only rarely, in certain lights and atmospheric conditions, were mortals visible to those who had slipped to the other side. I look at Flora’s tiny silhouette by the sea’s edge, staring at the horizon in a vacant reverie. Just one step and it seems she might slip quietly beneath the water.