She glanced over towards the rudimentary vestibule Max had cobbled together long before she had come to work for the family – old copper pipes snaking up to a shower head that sprayed in all directions but down, the weathered timber privacy boards beginning to split and warp.

Or . . .

She looked back at the sea again. It would be the same temperature anyway, and being brackish, the water here always left her feeling clean afterwards. Could there be a more perfect wind-down from her day: a cooling, cleansing swim in silky water before she fell headlong into bed?

She got up and stripped off where she stood, her clothes falling in a heap at her feet. She took another, large gulp of her vodka and tiptoed, naked as a baby, over the rocks towards the small cleft dug into the outermost knuckle of the isle. It stepped down in narrow, banded ledges to the water, looking clear and inviting, but she still gave a little gasp as it closed coldly over her feet. She sucked in her breath, tensing her muscles as she tried to adjust to the shock. The short channel here was narrow but the water was deep and she swung her arms above her head and dived in, feeling the icy grip and then release of the water’s embrace. She glided for several moments, surfacing with her face upturned so that her hair streamed back, before launching into a ferocious front crawl for several minutes to warm herself up.

She felt the city slough off her, the familiar rumble of traffic on Stockholm’s Centralbron, always in the background, replaced by an echoing silence. She felt her soul begin to shift, Summer Isle’s tranquillity sliding like a glove over exposed nerve endings.

She felt like she was home.

Chapter Seven

They settled quickly into the new routine, the first few days a blur of sandwich-making, sandcastle-building, rock-pool-exploring activity. They went out on the little boat with picnics wrapped and knotted up in a blue-and-white checked tablecloth, the children awkward in their bulky yellow buoyancy vests, their faces already turning berry-brown, their hair salty and increasingly tangled. They explored the nearby bays and coves of the neighbouring islands on the lagoon side, where the water was warmest and most protected. But although their world here was remote and small, it was not without incident – already there had been one allergy-inducing spider bite (Elise), a bleeding toe from standing on a piece of glass (also Elise) and a bright strip of sunburned back (Tilde) which had been missed in the regular suncream-slathering sessions.

With every dawn, the sun seemed to beat with growing intensity, each day hotter than the last so that bobbing, gliding and diving in the water was the only relief to be had. And when their skin was wrinkled, they took refuge in the speckled shade of the pines, idly pulling apart needles as Bell read to the girls after lunch and lulled them into drowsy naps on the blanket, giving her, Hanna and Linus – who seemed to be grouped with the adults this year – a few precious hours of peace.