Chloe gently squeezes one of Lotte’s sandy feet. Lotte opens her eyes. Luca mimes breathing. She shudders and then her chest rises and falls. Her cheeks flush, although her lips are still purple. My heart is jack-hammering in my chest. Amy scoops Lotte up and sits with her cradled on her knee.

‘What happened?’ she asks, more quietly now, staring at me and then at our father, who collapses onto the end of Lotte’s sunlounger, his face ashen.

‘I took her to the edge of the waves. We were playing. I was holding her the entire time!’ he says. ‘And then she – I don’t know what’s wrong.’

Luca says, ‘It is the panic attack. They are still afraid of the water. It is not a surprise, no?’ He cups Lotte’s head in one large hand, then gets to his feet and starts pulling on his T-shirt.

Amy and Matt exchange a look. Chloe drops a kiss on Lotte’s damp cheek and replaces her headphones as she returns to her sun-lounger.

Dad strokes Lotte’s knee. ‘There, there, Lotte. All right now?’

‘Don’t touch her!’ Amy spits at him.

Lotte burrows into her mother’s neck.

‘She did say she didn’t want to go swimming,’ says Theo, in his quiet, precise little voice, and pushes his bright-blond hair out of his eyes with one finger, scattering sand across his face.

Matt crouches down by Lotte. ‘Sweetheart, there’s nothing to be frightened of here. Mummy and I wouldn’t let anything bad happen to you.’

He doesn’t look at our father. His arms and shoulders are rigid with tension, and I’m acutely aware of what is left unsaid – that our father, yet again, is to blame; and the rest of us, the Flowers family, are culpable as well. Not one of us intervened in time. Not one of us is to be trusted.

Luca is damp but dressed, his cloth satchel slung across his chest. He holds out his arms and Lotte elbows her way out of her mother’s embrace. He scoops her up and puts her on his shoulders. Theo grabs his sandals where they’ve been half-buried in the sand and stands next to Luca.

‘I take them back to the house.’

‘I’ll come with you,’ says Amy.

Luca shakes his head. ‘It is okay. I think she have some quiet time. Is too hot here.’

‘I don’t want to leave her.’ Amy’s voice is shrill.

‘I’m okay, Mummy,’ says Lotte. ‘I don’t need you.’

I look away so that I don’t have to see Amy’s hurt expression. The plastic bucket is still lying where I dropped it by the water’s edge.