Lee didn’t snap awake or even stir. She slept on, oblivious.

Maya and I were both flinchers.

Maya had liked Cameron’s height. ‘Six-six,’ she said to me on the beach one day, when we were sinking one beer after another and letting the empties roll down the dunes. ‘He makes me feel like a baby doll.’

The nun’s room began to smell like me. The door was closed all day. Whenever I entered I could smell the scent of my sealed and sleeping body. I was surprised every time by its mustiness, by its potency.

One day I went into the nearest town and bought a candle to dissipate this odour. I paid for it out of the cash Marc gave me. That was our arrangement, cash in an envelope with nothing printed on it, once a week, usually a Friday. Whenever I smell cash on someone’s hands – that sweaty, grubby smell – I still think of him.

The candle was sea salt and cedar. I bought it at one of the nicer shops. It was a Saturday, my day off. I had the night off too but there was nothing to do. I came home in the late afternoon to find Marc reading on the couch, one long thin leg slung over the other.

‘Staying in tonight?’

‘I thought I’d have a quiet one.’

I came back downstairs later in the evening. Lee had been put to bed. Marc was peeling a long white vegetable that I’d never seen before.

‘It’s a daikon,’ he said when he saw me looking. ‘Have you eaten?’

Usually we ate apart. I had a single shelf in his fridge, a modest arrangement of cans in his pantry. But that night I joined him for dinner. I wasn’t sure what I’d be eating, but I knew there’d be no meat in it. I knew he was very keen on never harming the earth or the creatures that roamed it. And I knew this included creatures that I considered brainless – the mussels we prised from under the pier when I was young, the oysters we stole from farms when the tide went out.

He suggested we eat on the patio. I followed him outside.

He asked questions about me. Siblings? University? And what do you want to do eventually? I heard how narrow my life sounded as its components were paraded one by one in front of him. The unhemmed edges of my education. My one overseas trip, to Bali. My family working in their dull jobs: a deckhand, a dental nurse, a receptionist.

And then I heard it again, that low woo hoo coming at intervals, something between a voice and a woodwind instrument.

‘What is that?’ I said.

‘An owl,’ he said. ‘The Powerful Owl, to be exact.’

We sat in silence for a moment, listening to it.

‘Reminds me of one of the cases we discuss in class,’ he said.

‘Oh?’