A young baby cries, its yowl carried on the breeze, and Natalya feels the sound pierce her heart like a flint dagger. It is time for her to go. One more day to finish the work, to make good her promise, and then she must move on, blown on the wind like one of the gulls . . . She runs her finger back over the smooth green glass. A story is coming to her, one that she will save for her last night. Natalya has become fond of the three young children in the small house she has been staying in. For the past few weeks, as she worked on the nets, recovering her strength, she has told the children strange tales as they were put to bed. Tales of mermaids and shipwrecks, lost islands and angry giants, fairy folk and talking birds and of grand palaces drowned in thick snow.

Natalya places the glass nugget by her side, one small pebble amongst a million. She wonders what manner of bottle it might have come from, what jar or glass, what forgotten life it once lived. The last story before I vanish, she thinks to herself, and she smiles out at the wide-open skies.

The groom has fallen over. Annie noticed it earlier but there were people coming and going – visitors, tradesmen, patients, the hubbub of the day – and no opportunity to fix it until Edward had left for the hospital and all became calm. The couple stand under a glass dome, groom at a peculiar angle, matching smiles fixed in clay, surrounded by handmade artificial flowers. A wedding present from Annie’s since departed mother, they guard the short but imposing entrance hall from their viewpoint on the large oak sideboard.

Annie gingerly lifts the fragile dome, noting with irritation the traces of dust on her finger – Sarah has not been thorough with her work again. The groom topples over into her hand. A little clay Edward looks up at her with green eyes and she smiles back at him before turning him over, noting a hairline fracture running up along his back. She traces a finger over it, tenderly, before placing the figure back in the correct position and picking up her own clay self, dark blonde hair, rose-plaster lips. She remembers her mother painting it, laughing as she did so. ‘If you cannot be happy on your wedding day, Annie, when can you?’ Oh, thinks Annie and, for one terrible moment, she feels the loss of her mother anew.

She sighs as she gently replaces the bubble of glass, sealing the clay couple back into their own little world. Edward is late again, out drinking with Samuel, no doubt. Sometimes, she wishes they were still back in their old home. There seemed to be so many more hours in the day then, time enough for them to linger in bed, warm limbs entangled as the sunbeams broke through the gaps in the curtains.