Lottie’s smile was careful. ‘We’ll take it nice and slow when we get back. Perhaps it will be a bit easier to work at home. Less …’ she blinked her words away.

Tyger smelled muddy. Maybe he’d had a final roll around, just to bring something back with him. I had taken a last look at the loch this morning. Picked up a stone, a really flat one, and put it down again.

‘Sweetheart.’ Lottie put a hand on top of mine. A paler, freckled version, the skin thinner, the veins a little higher, but the shapes the same. She waited until my eyes lifted to hers. ‘It wasn’t your fault.’

I found the feather in my pocket, the first one I’d picked up on the road. I ran my nail along it, only one way.

As we rolled through the village a black crow unfolded itself on one of the swings, rising from the seat. Becca. Wrapping an elbow around one of the chains, she rocked, a slight pendulum, and very slowly, deliberately, raised her middle finger.

It wasn’t your bullet that killed me, not truly. I died the moment I turned into a swan. She did it, your mother, tricks broiled deep in her blood, in the mosses that grew in her brain. I’d felt it, her hatred of me, felt something dark and furred on my tongue, in my ears, before the feathers came. She killed us both.

We’ll be two swansouls, you and me. The rise and fall of our breath, the rise and fall of the sea.

16

Another train. This time everything was bare and bruised, just as he had once said it would be. The mountains had exposed jawbones. Leafless trees among the firs. Crows. Deer. And so much water.

It took me a while to pluck up the courage – the other side of the summer and more. I couldn’t phone, or even text. Couldn’t do it. So I wrote. I wrote a letter, on actual paper with a pen, like it was the nineteenth century, and addressed it to the village Post Office.

It was another month before I heard anything back.

There was a space behind my ribs, as if I were a plum with the stone removed. I stared out the window. The train was making an old-fashioned rattle as it climbed into the mountains, nothing but bleak hill on either side, stretching to the end of the world.

‘Hello,’ I said.

He was standing in front of the jeep, his hands by his sides, looking like he didn’t know where to put them. ‘All right.’ He had a real coat on, with tons of pockets and buttons. And the woolly hat, obviously.

We stood a couple of feet from each other. The wind had a blunt edge to it.

‘You changed your hair,’ he said.

‘Yeah.’ As soon as I had got home – proper home, home to Lottie’s – I’d gone into town and had it all chopped off, super short. I’d looked at all the faded pink draped on the floor, lots of brown mixed up with it, and felt nothing at all. Benji cried and ran away in terror when he saw me.