‘Dear girl, dear, dear, girl,’ she heard her mother whisper over and over again, felt her arms tighten. Thea wasn’t sure if she said anything in return apart from meaningless sounds, the words in her brain hopelessly mangled.

Though it felt to Thea that they had only been hugging for seconds, Vivian eventually pulled away to get a good look at her, lips twitching, a glint in her bloodshot eyes.

‘I told you it was a cult, didn’t I?’

Thea gave a hoarse laugh and glanced around the boat, not a small inflatable thing, but big with glistening orange paint, safety rails, walkways, and people. Quite a few people, faces that she didn’t know. Behind her Rory was being helped aboard. She knew that the people were made of flesh and muscle and blood, that the boat was fibreglass and plastic and rubber but to her it all felt paper thin. She could poke her finger through it all and watch it tear.

‘How?’ she managed before her legs wobbled and Vivian helped her into the cabin where she could sit out of the wind. She worried she would sink straight through the hard seat, puddle through its cracks and pool on the floor into a shapeless blob, but with Rory sat on one side and Vivian on the other, they kept her up and kept her whole.

She scanned the sea around them and shifted in her seat. ‘Wait. I don’t think it’s safe. I think … there are probably people coming for us—’

And then a familiar voice interrupted her: ‘This is the coastguard, girlie. Official now, see?’

And if she was just getting used to the idea that all the rest of it was real, then this part at least had to be a hallucination, Thea thought, as the man walked towards her. This man should have been in a pub armoured with abandoned hanging basket hooks, making tuna and dandruff sandwiches.

‘But—?’

‘Thea, this is Alastair,’ Vivian said. ‘He’s been a great help.’

‘Nice to see you again, Thea.’ He held out his hand and she took it, her own dwarfed in his rough fingers. ‘Said I was a lifeboat man, didn’t I?’ He chuckled.

Vaguely she remembered the dust-fogged photo on the pub wall and the collection box on the reception counter. There was something different about the man stood in front of her, however. It wasn’t the newly shaven chin and dandruff-free shoulders, though that was surprising enough; it was the way a new light shone in the granite of his face.

‘So you see, Alastair’s lovely friends at the lifeboat station were more than happy to help – after all, you did need rescuing from sea.’ And when Vivian next spoke her voice was steel. ‘You are safe.’