He hadn’t even reminded me to put suncream on. What kind of parent was he going to make? He certainly had a lot to learn.

I got the suncream out of my basket and dotted it on my legs and arms, then rubbed it into my skin till the white smears disappeared. It was Ava who had shown me how to do that. It smelled good; it smelled of laziness, of the kind of days when the ice-cream van comes round and you make daisy-chains and stay up late because it’s too hot to sleep.

When I looked up at the sea again, it was as blue and sparkling as a postcard or an illustration in a storybook.

I lay down on my back and rested my straw hat on my face and listened to the sound of the waves. The little kid whose mother was meant to be keeping an eye on me was chatting away to herself in French. Soothing, beachside sounds. Holiday sounds. I closed my eyes: the insides of my eyelids turned a warm orangey-brown, like the glowing embers of a fire, the way I imagined Grandma.

I couldn’t feel her now, though. Maybe I wasn’t calm enough. I didn’t feel calm at all, and that wasn’t good.

I had missed something. Something important. Something big, something to do with Mark. Something I didn’t know yet. But did Mum? Did Ava? I could feel it, but I couldn’t make out anything other than the scale and weight of it. It was a burden, a terrible pressure, and it was his – it was something he carried around everywhere, and that meant now it was ours, too.

Maybe he thought that he’d be able to escape it, or let go of it. Or at least forget it. But it didn’t seem like the kind of thing that would get better just by being left alone. It seemed like it might get bigger the more he ignored it, until it had almost completely taken him over, until there was almost nothing else.

After he’d finished swimming he came back and sat down on his towel next to me to dry off in the sun, and then Mum appeared, waving at us from a distance across the beach and picking her way round the sunbathers to get to us.

She didn’t look very happy. In fact, when she came closer, I could see that she’d been crying. I wondered what on earth Ava had said to her.

‘No Ava, then,’ Mark said as she sat down on his towel, in the space between us.

‘No. I think she’s all right, though. Or she will be.’ She drew a deep breath. ‘Ellie, there’s something we have to tell you.’

Mark said, ‘I thought you said we should all be together for this.’

Mum said, rather sharply, ‘Ava doesn’t want to be here.’

‘Shouldn’t we have discussed this?’ Mark said.

I said, ‘Discussed what?’

Mum said, ‘We have to tell her, Mark. We can’t just let it linger.’