‘When are you ever not joking around?’ Amber replies, shaking her head in disapproval. She doesn’t mind it really. It’s part of the three women’s camaraderie, the push and pull, the jokes and sarcasm. They drive her crazy sometimes, the two of them. But Amber isn’t sure where she’d be right now if it hadn’t been for their constant presence. They are all the family she’s known, being born and brought up in Winterton Chine. Her dad, a lorry driver, had cleared off a few months after she was born.

‘He always moaned about having to put up with two crazy redheads,’ her mother would say. ‘Then you come along, another redhead, screaming your lungs off every hour of the night.’ Some might take that as rejection. But from what Amber had heard from her mother, aunt and half the people in town about her hard-drinking, verbally abusive dad, she took it as a compliment. For years, it had just been her and her mother in their little terraced house in town, her aunt Viv a few doors down with her husband. But then they’d divorced and now it was just the three women – or ‘The Three Reds’ as the locals called them.

‘Getting really cold,’ Rita says, unfolding a thick fleece blanket and placing it over hers and Viv’s legs as they sit on a bench. ‘They’re saying on the news we might get snow.’

Amber twists at the wool of her jumper. ‘Hope not.’ She looks down at her left hand and the centimetre-long stubs that are an excuse for her fingers. Cold days like this always make her loss even more pronounced. She grabs a glove and pulls it on as her aunt and mother exchange a look. She worries that the sight of her fingerless hand puts customers off. Though her mum and aunt tell her she’s imagining it, she sees the way some customers’ eyes sweep over her right hand, a fleeting look of confusion. Better just to wear gloves when she can.

She sighs and grabs her paintbrush as her aunt and mother sit in contented silence.

‘Oh! Here we go, first customer of the day,’ her aunt says, voice puncturing the silence.

Amber follows her aunt’s gaze to see a woman walking down the beach. No, not a woman. More a slip of a girl with shoulder-length hair the colour of white birch, streaks of blue through it. Amber shades her eyes from the hard winter sun, taking in the girl’s woollen dress and snagged tights. ‘She’s not wearing a coat.’

‘No shoes either,’ Viv adds in surprise. ‘My God, she’ll catch her death.’

The girl stumbles slightly then pauses, looking down at herself in confusion.

‘Looks like she’s drunk,’ Rita says.