I don’t know how I get through the long hours of night and day that follow the telling. Scraps of memory. Helen and Captain Crane’s strong and calm arms getting me back to my cabin. My body thudding at walls. My face sliding down surfaces slippery with tears. My fingers tightly bunched in the hair at my temples. My wailing and wailing and saying his name over and over and wailing again. Snot-damp tear-damp sheets. Helen there, often. Saying someone has to be with me. Henry gentle with a tray of food I can’t eat. My hurting head. My raw eyes, ragged with grief and disbelief.

I ring my mother and at first she doesn’t know if I’m laughing or weeping and then she’s weeping with me.

‘Oh, my baby, my baby.’

I rush out to the deck with cries and screams for the sky to hear. I lean far over the railing and look down to the towering drop and the swell in the ocean heaves to me and I wonder where he is. It’s a while before I speak to Jack. After the search he was taken back to the station and heavily sedated.

‘Do you really want to know, Fin? It’s pretty awful.’

‘Um, yeah. Yeah I do. I have to face it.’

I can sense him thinking where to begin.

‘We were staying in a field hut. It was about ten k from the station. Right on the coast with the hills behind us. It was a really strange, sullen evening. The clouds were low, like one big blanket across the sky. The sun was sort of streaking across their underbelly.’ His voice is calm and thorough as he recollects.

‘The sky was just incredible. You know Max, he had to go out into it. He wanted me to come on a walk with him but I was really tired. So, he went by himself. He took his book, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller. He said that he was going out to this bluff that was sort of nearby, to watch the sunset and read. I—I dozed off. I woke with a start at eleven-thirty. Max wasn’t back. The wind had kicked up. I went outside. It was really blowy. I couldn’t see him anywhere. I yelled and yelled. There was snow everywhere. I started to panic. I went back to the hut and radioed the station. They couldn’t get the chopper out to us until the wind died down. They said to stay inside no matter what, because they didn’t want two people out there and I’d never be able to find him. So I had to sit it out. I waited in that hut for fourteen hours for that fucking wind to die down.’

‘Oh Jack.’