Emil looked on, feeling a stab of envy at their closeness. He could see how Linus’s gaze always tracked back to Bell like a safety buoy, and he felt his position as the third wheel keenly again, his confidence having disappeared like that mist . . .

‘Aren’t you coming in?’ Bell asked, as though it was that easy. As though happiness could be grabbed with a single leap.

‘I thought I’d film Linus doing some jumps first.’

‘Oh. Okay.’ She gave an easy shrug.

‘Cool!’ Linus exclaimed, looking more lively than Emil had ever seen him. It was clear neither one of them was bothered whether he joined them or not.

‘So is there a path up there?’ she asked, straining to see.

‘Yes. Climb out below the bushes and you’ll see it runs behind. It’s narrow, though, in places, so –’

‘Okay, I’ll go first and he can follow me,’ she said, hardly able to wait. ‘Come on, Liney.’

He watched them swim off, their wet, darkened heads like seals’ as they moved further away. Their voices carried as they got to the rocks and he watched their limbs scramble and climb as they hauled themselves from the water. Within minutes they were standing on the shallow ledge that had always been his jumping-off point as a boy. This was his place; he had brought them here; and yet he felt shut out from it. An observer of a private moment.

He held up his phone and watched them through the zoom lens. They were holding hands, peering over the edge – checking for rocks, no doubt – and chatting away. She was wearing a black bikini, her wet dark hair slicked back. Her body looked soft, relaxed, in the sunshine but he still remembered the way she had tensed like a stray cat as she talked about her dead fiancé . . . It was a strange thing to know something so intimate about a near-stranger, to see a beautiful woman in a bikini, a child by her side, and to understand that despite this distant image of seemingly perfect happiness, she was hollow inside too. Like him.

He watched them jump together, heels kicking back, arms outstretched, hair flying upwards, their shrieks carrying over to him. They were everything he wanted to be, everything he wanted . . .

But no. That evening with her had been but a glancing flash of light in both their lives. Though it had held a quiet importance for him – reminding him he was alive, that he was a flesh-and-blood man, still – she could never know it. They must remain, fundamentally, strangers who had once shared a night under the midnight sun. Nothing more. She could never be more than that. Now, she was just the nanny.

‘Did you get it?’ Linus yelled, triumph in his still-high voice.

Emil caught his breath, realizing he had forgotten to click.

Chapter Eighteen

‘So what shall we do today?’ Emil asked as they finished breakfast. It had mostly been taken in silence, the overnight sleep somehow setting them all back a step from yesterday’s adventures, formality restored again.