‘Are you all right?’ Danny said when he caught up with her.

Shauna turned and glanced back at the hill, to make sure they were out of earshot of Alice and Ben.

‘What is it?’

Shauna shook her head and pushed the heel of her palm into her eye. She was crying and trying not to cry. Shauna did not emote easily or often, and especially not in public.

‘I didn’t want to do this now,’ she said, ‘so I dared myself. I said, I know he won’t take the joint. So I’ll only say something if I offer him the joint and he takes it. And then you did.’

‘What do you want to say?’

Shauna took her hands from her face, sniffed.

‘I’ve been thinking about this for a while. How we’ve come to this point where, you know, I’ll be heading to college and things are going to change for us, again.’

Danny was facing the inoperative turbine. He could see that the socket, the chamber, at the top of the turbine was roughly the size of a large room, because there were men in it, at least two. He could see the luminescent yellow rectangles of their ­high-­vis vests moving back and forth on the edge of the socket, nothing but a clean drop beyond. They were surely in harnesses. The blade was rising towards them. It was going to dock, like a ship. Alice had called it a spaceship, hadn’t she? And it did look like a ship or rocket, this tapered cylinder of sleek white material a hundred feet long, a rocket from the future. But why were the men up there? Just to observe, or were they going to help guide the thing into position? Even from this distance, Danny could see that the base of the blade, the section that was going to connect to the hub, was several times the diameter of a man. The blade itself must have weighed several tons. The idea that the affixing of this enormous object to the even more enormous object of the turbine came down to the intervention of a couple of human ­beings – the precariousness of ­that – was impos­sible for him to believe. Yet there they were.

Danny’s scalp prickled as he imagined being one of them, all the way up there.

Shauna was still talking. She was talking about how they were going to be apart.

‘We’ve always been apart,’ Danny snapped. What he meant was that so much of their relationship had already been ­long ­distance, that if they’d done it before, they could do it again.

‘There’s another thing,’ Shauna said. ‘It’s hard to say. It’s hard to put it in words. The way you’ve been, since you got back. And it’s understandable, with how it ended over there for you.’

‘And how’ve I been?’