It was her. It had been her all along.

‘Why didn’t you say anything?’ My voice had gone to shreds.

‘Say what? I didn’t want trouble again.’ He caught my look and smiled ruefully. ‘I’ve taken more than umbrellas in my time.’

Swans and girls and bones and—

Johnny was still talking. ‘How would I have helped, anyway, saying what I’d seen? It made no sense. A swan becoming a girl? I might have – if he’d said. Jimmie. But he didn’t, you see.’

I prised the cup off my leg. A red circle. ‘Why wouldn’t he have done?’

He took the cup from me. ‘Say what he saw? ’Cause they’d have deemed him mad, lass.’

Bones and feathers and—

‘Wouldn’t that have been … better?’

‘No.’ The word came out low and long. ‘His ma was away on the winds for years, lassie. Institutionalised. I don’t think he wanted to end up like her.’

Feathers and clouds and mists and—

‘He wasn’t good enough for Molly. Not by a long shot.’

Swans and girls and bones and feathers and clouds and mists and—

I was under the hazel and then I was in the sky.

She changed me. Your mother. How could you have known?

My shoulder blades stretched taut and angled, hooks under the skin. My head was too far away from my body. A heaviness in my chest like stones weighted there.

There was a shadow underneath me, a small slick of oil slipping fast over the water, and I watched it, and I realised that it was me. A swan. Not a girl.

And then – I fell.

I didn’t see you. See the shotgun. Your anger at your mother, at her refusal of us, the anger that made you lift it to your shoulder when you saw a swan. Instinctive, or maybe more than that. Maybe her curse on me had cursed your blood, too.

Your face above me. Full of bright pain, before it gathered every shadow that had ever been.

It was the last thing I saw. It will always be the last thing.

And I will be the first thing you see when you come to me.

It was all her. All Molly. Molly, or some sort of strange, halfling, Instagram-filtered version of her.

I walked back with my gut churning, Gran-gran’s words clumping up together again like flotsam. I’ll see you again on this shore some day.

I tried phoning him. No answer, though that was hardly unusual seeing as there was basically a non-reception force field around his house. Or maybe he was looking at my name flashing up, willing it to go away.

I’ll see you again on this shore.

The look he’d given me when I’d started talking about what I’d seen. He’d known. What it was. Who she was. He’d known before I had.

The morning after the waterfall and the storm. His hand curling round my shoulder blade, my bra all wonky. Clearing away my hair to put the prickle of his beard there. My gluey stomach.