Will is on the other side of me, his shaking hands on my hair, my arms.

‘Are you all right? Baby, are you all right?’

‘She’s okay,’ Charlie says again, in that unsteady voice.

Someone wraps me in a blanket.

‘We were looking for Mum when we …’ Will’s voice breaks. ‘I saw you. I saw you going into the sea, and I …’

Some feeling has come back into my skin. It prickles and fizzes hot when he presses his face into the space between my neck and shoulder. I realise that he’s just as wet as I am.

‘I could have lost you. Jesus, Maggie. I could have lost you both.’

And then more than just hearing or seeing or feeling returns. Awareness comes back to me like another electric shock, so fast, so at once, that it makes me jolt. I look around at the beach, dark with approaching night. It’s full of people. Alec and Fiona and Sheena. Jimmy, Isla, and Jaz. And next to Euan, soaking wet and sobbing on the sand, wrapped inside another blanket, is Cora. Gillian crouches alongside her, an arm around her shoulders. But Gillian isn’t looking at Cora. Instead, she’s looking at me.

I think of those bubbles tickling my skin, the last of the air in my lungs.

I struggle up onto my hands and knees. Because there’s something bigger behind my panic – something I found in the storm, in the sea, that I can’t remember yet. And then suddenly I remember Kenny, grinning down the barrel of his shotgun. We killed him.

‘Maggie, what’s wrong?’ Will says. And I long to lean against all that concern, to lay my head on it and go to sleep.

‘Maggie?’ Charlie says.

Trust nobody, Mum whispers in my roaring ears.

When I manage – finally – to get onto my feet, I’m sobbing. Even though the wind is calmer now, I stagger against it. Against Will’s hands and concern. The sand gives way under my feet, pitching me forwards.

‘Maggie?’

Miko is standing ahead of the path down to the beach. She’s holding a small, bright torch and wearing a neon-green-and-yellow anorak. I stare at her, all that colour and light, and stumble towards it, letting her catch me before I fall.

‘Please.’ I try so hard not to cough I almost forget to breathe. ‘Get me away from here.’

‘Maggie, what—’

‘Please.’

‘She needs to go to hospital.’

I cringe away from Charlie’s voice. Too close. I grab hold of Miko’s sleeve, so tightly she winces.

‘You weren’t breathing. Jesus. Jesus, Maggie,’ Will says, reaching for my hand. ‘You didn’t have a pulse.’

‘I’ll take her back to Long Stride,’ Miko says. And something inside me finally loosens at the resolve in her voice. The authority. I feel so relieved that my legs almost forget to keep holding me up.

‘Come on,’ she says, putting an arm around my waist. And if a slight tremor comes into her voice, I can hardly blame her for it. Not when my heart is still hammering so hard inside my chest, I can hear it. I’m aware enough to know it’s panic. Panic and shock. Hypoxia and probably hypothermia. But it’s not only that. It’s the briny dread that still clogs my throat. That makes me think of those tickling bubbles of air and Kenny’s smile, his teeth. A storm is coming.