Will leaves the road and tramps across the dark marshes. How long’s he been walking now? It’s hard to say – an hour, ninety minutes maybe? He reaches the main line that runs parallel to the coast. With few trains running at this time of night, he walks the track, striding between the sleepers. Only when he reaches the level crossing at Ebbswick does he stop.

He crouches on the grassy embankment. Beside him, the rails gleam in the moonlight. In front of him, the main road is almost deserted. A van passes, rumbling over the crossing. Will follows its tail lights as it passes the derelict shops where Danny’s car broke down.

Are we going to speak ever again, Will wonders, or is this it? He gazes up the road as it curves into Patten’s Island and thinks of Nain, at home right now. He knows there has to be an expiry date on her current good patch. Looking to his left, his gaze follows the road that leads to the front. Demolition fencing circles the rubble-strewn ground where two months ago the library stood.

A warning siren begins to bleat. The traffic lights flash red. Will steps a few metres back from the line as the rails hum and the barriers descend over the road. At eighty miles per hour, a ten-carriage express hammers past. The noise and the vibration and the rushing of the wind shake something out of place in Will, like a blockage from a pipe.

He drops to his knees and he cries. He really cries. So hard he struggles for breath. Not just because of the row with his dad and brother. Not just because he fucked it up with the only girl he’s ever loved. Not just because he’s been awake for forty hours straight. But because of it all. He feels as though his world is shifting beneath him, as if one era is being ushered out, a new one in. He cries for what’s being left behind. And he cries because he fears the unknown up ahead.

‘What now?’ he says to the night, everything quiet once again. ‘Tell me what I’m supposed to do now.’

I am right here with you. I am always with you.

Please don’t cry. And don’t beg for my help like that. I need you. You need me. But not tonight. The things you’ve done this weekend, they are important. And you did them all without a word from me – perhaps that’s the most important thing of all.

Are you now who you need to be? With each message from me, with every change you’ve made, you have grown a little more.

You are changed. You are not the person you once were.

Stop your worrying.

I’m right here with you.

Home Time

The train shrinks into the distance and the level crossing barriers squawk open. Will has his back to the town as he dabs at his tears, casting a long, narrow shadow over the tracks and on to the marsh road beyond. Yellow light washes over him from behind. The irregular beat of an idling engine is familiar.