Now she looked at the seagulls, always on the wing, always searching for food, and felt sorry for them in a way she couldn’t quite explain. As if the freedom she perceived was in fact false, that they were tied to this world by the same rope as she.

Seagulls can drink salt water. Emily watched one bobbing along the surface of the sea. Just the same as they did off the Norfolk coast. They’re clever too, using breadcrumbs stolen from humans to attract fish, and tapping on the ground with their feet to make worms think there’s rain up above, tricking them to the surface. They’re survivors.

“What’s that?” Tyler nodded at the envelope Emily was fingering, one of its corners beginning to fray.

“Her diary.” Emily found herself handing it over to him and wondered how she would feel if he used his cigarette to set it on fire, or simply tossed it out to sea.

“You’ve never seen it before?” he asked, opening the lip and peering inside.

“Nope.” Emily had had no idea her grandmother had even kept a diary. There had been nothing in the cottage, which meant Catriona must have moved it before she died.

When had it all been planned? Emily had been so wrapped up in her own day-to-day, along with trying not to think about how frail her grandmother was, how much she was slowly slipping away, to notice what she was really up to.

“And you don’t mind me reading it?”

Emily tilted her head to the heavens, shut her eyes and sucked in great lungfuls of salty air. “Knock yourself out.”

“Maybe later.” She heard him give a low chuckle, then the shift of foot and quiet rustle of paper. She imagined him tucking the envelope into the back pocket of his jeans, thought of reaching in her hand to check.

“You’re rather chatty this morning.”

“So?”

A pause, followed by a slow exhale. “What’s changed?”

Emily shrugged. She herself didn’t know. Perhaps it was the very fact she was somewhere else, with someone else. Heading toward a place she had not been since she was a child. So many changes in the space of so little time.

“May I?” she asked, pointing at the headphones draped around his neck. They were the one thing she had forgotten to bring, the one item she should have made a point of putting in her suitcase but which she knew still hung off the back of the chair in the kitchen.

“Sure.” There was an unspoken curiosity on his face, but his upbringing, all that private education and those lessons in etiquette, seemed to be telling him not to pry.

“I want to draw,” she said, gesturing over to where a single seagull was perched on the railing, regarding them with eyes like marbles, his long, orange beak curved open.

She wanted nothing more than to draw something familiar, something that had nothing to do with the search. The escapism of drawing a magnificent seagull standing so proud and cocky on deck, waiting to snatch a sandwich from an unsuspecting hand. Like the urban fox of the sea.