I looked up. ‘I don’t know. And what is it about them?’

His eyes darted around the table.

‘Why were you there?’ I said. ‘On the road?’

He bit down on a fingernail and spoke to it. ‘Thought you might be there. Thought I would …’ He didn’t seem to want to finish his sentence. ‘Try and’ – he shook his head and his hand fell onto his thigh – ‘talk to you.’

I had to ask him. ‘What happened? With Molly?’ It was the first time I’d said her name out loud. The name that rhymed. I wondered how else I rhymed with her. ‘I know there’s something – I know you didn’t do it.’ My voice came out louder than I’d meant it to. ‘You covered up for someone, didn’t you?’

Jim went very still. I waited for him to tell me. To tell me it was Johnny. There was a crack in the wall next to the doorframe. Four faint little patches of deep red. His knuckles.

He brought his head up. ‘No.’ I heard the tap drip, just a notch louder than the rain. Once, twice. ‘It was me. Sorry to disappoint you.’ The words were plain, lean, sad.

There was a large stone pressing against my chest, without malice, pushing me slowly into the wall. Pushing further. ‘Something happened, though, didn’t it?’

He ground his wrist into his forehead. ‘Look, you don’t know me. No one does. And if I can’t explain it then …’ His arm thunked down on the table and he looked at me properly for the first time that day. ‘How can anyone else?’

God, why did he have to be so opaque? ‘You don’t know me either. I see – weird shit happens to me. I can’t explain it.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Things following me around.’ I put my face behind my palms, swiped them to my temples. Like you do, Gran-gran had said.

Jim chewed at his bottom lip. ‘What things?’

‘Half the time I think it’s just the weed and that. I don’t know what’s real and what’s not. I don’t know where the line is. But …’ I might as well come out with it all. Everything else had fallen apart. ‘Clouds in the water, and mist, and shapes coming out of trees, or on the horizon, walking or floating, I can never tell, and the orchid petal falling, now that I think about it. There was a light, when I was lost after the bothy, following me. And feathers. A swan feather. On my pillow. I thought you might have left that, and the wings, but now I don’t know, it sounds stupid but maybe that was the thing as well. And last night—’

I stopped. He was looking at me, his jaw hanging open. His eyes travelled the room. His breathing was the breathing of someone on their death-bed.

He leant back very slowly in his chair, the wood popping. ‘You should go now.’