Maddy is too unsettled by this new status as the wronged wife. A role that she never wanted. A role she hates Helen for giving her. Because now she feels on the back foot. Why should Helen get to feel clear about her future, when she feels as if her life has been ripped away from her?

She stalks to the car, pressing the blipper, but her legs are shaking. Helen calls after her as she gets in, the engine growling as she drives away. She can see Helen in the rear-view mirror watching, shrugging as if she’d tried to reason with her. Maddy drives around the corner and screeches to a halt, taking in a gasp of air. Then she hits the steering wheel with her palms and yells.

Helen is not getting her house. No way. Over her dead body.

For a moment, she contemplates driving home to tell Trent exactly that, but she’s too jangled. She needs to re-group. Re-assess. Pull herself together.

She needs to get in the sea.

26

Dawn Call

When the alarm goes off at four thirty in the morning, Tor groans as she switches it off, then turns to face Lotte. She strokes the blue and blonde hair away from Lotte’s face, thinking how childlike she looks when she sleeps.

‘Hon,’ she says.

She leans across and kisses Lotte’s cheek. She smells vaguely of tobacco, mixed with Nivea cream. Lotte’s not one for beauty protocols and never takes her make-up off before bed, but she does slap on a bit of cream when she remembers.

‘Babes, come on. If we’re doing it, we have to go.’ ‘Uhhh,’ Lotte says and opens one bloodshot blue eye. ‘Yep. It’s brutal, but we’re doing it.’

She thinks Lotte is going to ignore her and go back to sleep, but she screws up her face.

‘OK, OK, yep,’ Lotte says and Tor kisses her again, because she knows how much Lotte hates the cold and the mornings.

They get dressed, Lotte throwing jumpers over the Fleabag T-shirt she’s wearing. Her thighs are elaborately tattooed and she stumbles, naked from the waist down, to their tallboy chest of drawers they got from a car boot sale in the marina.

‘I don’t know where my costume is,’ she says.

‘Nice excuse. Wear knickers and the wet suit.’

‘You reckon?’

‘You’re not used to the cold.’

‘You do realise how much I love you to be even considering this?’ Lotte says, turning round.

‘Yes. I do. I’m going to make a flask of tea. Do not go back to bed.’

There’s a splatter of rain against the window and Lotte shivers. ‘Is that rain? That’s rain, right? Brrrr.’

Tor shrugs and pulls a face. Yesterday, she checked the weather app relentlessly, not really believing that the one hundred per cent chance of rain was true. She grew up with parents who inherently distrusted the weather predictions after the 1987 storm wiped out her dad’s Volvo when a fallen tree crushed it. But the forecast has turned out to be depressingly accurate. She’d so been hoping for clear-blue skies, and for this to feel like a hopeful event, but now she worries that the charity swim is going to be a subdued affair.