The details of what happened that awful day were there all along, but they always hid behind Shelly’s self-blame. Uppermost in Shelly’s memory of her holiday with David and Simon, was that she had caused a string of events that led to a tragedy. The suppressed reason why she absolutely had to dive now was to prove to herself that if she had been able to dive then, she would have saved him.

However, in truth, if she had managed to dive, she may well have also become entangled in that same net and it could have been a double tragedy. Even if she hadn’t gone on that holiday with David, he would still, most probably, have investigated what was in the bottom of that old sunken boat, and the tragic outcome would have been the same.

All this time, subconsciously, Shelly had been searching for a way to prove that if she could, she would have rescued David, she would have cut the fishing net away from him, as she had with the turtle, and he would have escaped his awful fate. But she simply didn’t have the skill to dive. What happened to David was not her fault! It had nothing to do with her precious bangle, or her obsession with her mother’s death. It was an accident that may well have happened whether she had gone on holiday with him, or not.

Her sense of relief was so intense, she almost floated to the surface without the essential decompression stop.

She squeezed Harry’s hand. He couldn’t know what this dive meant, that something so significant had happened.

They pulled themselves up the boat ladder, feeling the force of gravity dragging at every muscle and limb, and the weight of their equipment making their emergence from the sea almost impossible. Harry’s sons stood either side of the dive ladder and hauled them up until they eventually plopped onto the bench, feeling almost unbearably heavy now that they were out of the water. The boys relieved them of diving gear and then they wriggled out of their dry suits, too exhausted to speak.

Sometime later, partly recovered, they sat side by side as Harry’s sons dealt with the chores to close the dive. ‘That was magical, thank you,’ Shelly said, hardly able to raise her voice above a murmur. Harry nodded and smiled.

*

‘Are you going to tell me what happened down there?’ Harry asked over dinner that evening.

‘Ah, on the Burdigala?’

He nodded.

‘Hm, yes, sorry about that.’ She hesitated; she never spoke to anybody about David, but somehow she found herself longing to open up to Harry. ‘Something catastrophic took place when I was sixteen, before I’d learned to dive, and it all came back in a similar scene.’

‘You seemed traumatised.’