I hadn’t resolved anything. He hadn’t told me anything. ‘But wait, I—’

Jim stood up.

He hadn’t offered me a lift. I walked back up in the rain, long waterfalls of it. No cars passed. I held my jacket over my head, covering my phone, waiting for a bar to appear. Lottie didn’t pick up. The bar wavered. Finn neither. Or Bev.

‘Christ. You look like a drowned dog. What are you doing out here?’ Adam had the passenger window wound down halfway.

‘I don’t know.’ I got in next to him and stared straight ahead. My hair was wallpaper-pasted to my cheeks.

‘Did you get lost?’

I turned his radio off.

He seemed to understand that now wasn’t the time for flirting, or talking, or anything, and did a swift, smooth U-turn. ‘Let’s get you home.’

I felt like I was going into meltdown again. She’d been killed, by him. But there was something else. There was. Even he’d said so. How could I know if he didn’t tell me?

Seaweed collected in my brain, crackling pods rubbing against each other as I lay awake. He thought I was mental. I probably was mental. The room felt moist, as if it were drizzling inside. A darkness that would last only a few hours.

I waited for it to come. To rustle, to draw stinging lines on my neck, to morph and move into something I finally wanted to understand.

It never did. I woke up at half four, the day already coming, the birds going off like every type of alarm clock possible.

The orchid had lost all its petals. They lay, scattered wings.

Wings and white.

It’s hard to describe what happens, when you turn from one thing into another.

As I sat watching the rain that night, I felt translucent. As if lights were shining inside me. Making me glow, cold and glimmery. Each raindrop sparked another. I was illuminated. I thought, I should start walking again, get up there, to you, never mind this weather. It’s just weather. And then—

The gloaming.

I looked it up once, that word, though the ‘o’ and the ‘a’ were mixed up in my head. A dark, shimmering word. A sound like a moon. Like the moon, lamenting.

Silver into liquid into a new shape.

My spine began to burn. A prickle all over, thistles under the skin. My mouth hardened, amber-coloured. I wanted to moan with the pain of it and the beauty of it, and nothing came out. My neck soared. I was frozen into a heart-shape.

And I flew.

This girl doesn’t fly, the one on the road, the one who is sad. She doesn’t turn from one thing into another. She hasn’t understood, not quite. But perhaps she has said enough.

Day into night. Sun into rain. Girl into bird.

15

‘One more for your collection,’ I said, dumping Lottie’s umbrella in the bucket.

Johnny was holding the door open as if it were the gate to a royal palace. He’d done so only after peering oddly at my face and over my shoulders. If Jim wouldn’t tell me, I would find someone else who would, and at the bonfire, Johnny had looked almost as disturbed by my wings as Jim had. And there was a photo of Molly on his wall.